A Cost-Benefit Evaluation Server for decision support in e-business

Business organizations are often faced with decision situations in which the costs and benefits of some competing business specifications such as business offers, product specifications, or negotiation proposals need to be evaluated in order to select the best or desirable ones. In e-business, there is a need to automate the cost–benefit evaluation process to support decision making. This paper presents a general-purpose Cost–Benefit Evaluation Server (CBES) and its underlying Cost–Benefit Decision Model (CBDM), which models benefits in terms of costs and logical scoring and aggregation of preferences associated with products and services. The Server provides build-time tools for users to specify preference and cost information and a run-time engine to perform cost–benefit evaluations. A business scenario involving supplier selection and automated negotiation is given to illustrate the application of the Server and its four evaluation modes. D 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.