A Model-Driven Approach for the Rapid Development of E-Negotiation Systems

Most of today’s e-marketplaces support a single negotiation protocol. The protocol is usually built into the e-marketplace infrastructure, therefore if a new protocol is introduced then a time consuming and complex process of implementing it takes place. Moreover, participants in the e-marketplace need to adapt their interfaces to the new protocol, especially if they make use of automated means such as software agents to interact with the e-marketplace. This paper reports on a model-driven approach and a framework for rapid and user-friendly development of configurable e-marketplaces and automated enegotiation systems. A designer on the e-marketplace specifies negotiation protocols using Statecharts and feeds them to a mapping system that transforms them into web service orchestrations. Participants use automated negotiation systems to interact with the e-marketplace. An automated negotiation entity capable of interacting with the e-marketplace is generated based on the negotiation protocol implemented on the e-marketplace. The automated negotiation entity is provided with negotiation strategies and tactics specified in a declarative format. We propose a mapping algorithm to transform Statechart models of negotiation protocols into web service orchestrations and we report on the implementation our framework. ♦ This work has been partially supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada. 1 Stefanie Rinderle is from University of Ulm, Germany. This work was conducted during her post-doctoral stay at the University of Ottawa, Canada