Conducting The Agile Negotiation Processes Involved In The BPEL4WS Model On a Multi-agent Platform

A key requirement for current e-Business is to build interoperable e-Business processes for the emerging business models within different enterprise boundaries. Negotiation processes are at the core of the inter-operable e-Business. While research on negotiation is not new, the vast majority of the studies to date have been based on the multi-agent platform. However, it is very common that negotiation processes are interleaved with other business processes that are automated normally by a workflow system. Therefore, the inter-operability with other internaland externalsystems is critical in such case, which may require extra efforts on the integration issues. In this paper, we propose an approach for building a workflow system with negotiation processes incorporating the BPEL4WS[8], a standard for building and managing web service based business processes, on a multiagent platform in a pure distributed manner. By adapting our approach, negotiation process can be involved in the BPEL4WS process and deployed seamlessly. The existing work on negotiation based on multi-agent system also can be adapted directly with our approach. Keyword: Business Process Model, BPEL4WS, Web Services, Multi-agent System, Interaction Protocol, Automatic Negotiation