A Negotiation Model for CSCW

The aim of this paper is to present our model of a generic and exible negotiation service and its implementation in Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) environments. Users of a cooperative work environment naturally need negotiation support mechanisms in order to study possible alternatives during the establishment of common decisions. Each group decision member, through his/her role, responsibility and skills, participate to the negotiation process by discussing problems to solve, rules to suit, constraints to respect, outlooks to target, means to invest, tasks to ful l, etc. . . Nowadays, the explosion of distributed applications for telecommuting, cooperative work, video-conference, electronic commerce, etc. . . , is giving an increasing importance to computer supported negotiation. The objective of our work is to build a negotiation model independent of any particular application domain. Contrary to studied models, our model focuses on formalising the negotiation from three points of view: information exchanged between the agents to negotiate (the language), the way this information is exchanged (the protocol), and the internal behavior of an agent (the tactics). In addition to a separation of the problems involved in each one of these three facets of the negotiation, this approach allows also a greater exibility than traditional systems dedidacted to one kind of problems. We chose to use a transactional approach based on speech acts to develop our axiom based negotiation model which has been implemented as a negotiation service in our CSCW environment DisCOO [MBG99, MG98]. After the tackled problem presentation, we will expose the state of the art, then the proposed negotiation formal model, and, nally, the implementation. keywords : Computer-supported Cooperative work, negotiation