An Evaluation of Formalisms for Negotiations in E-commerce

The diversity of negotiation types in e-commerce calls for a clear description of the rules that govern them. The participant has to know the rules before engaging in a negotiation, and to this end, a formalism is needed which allows for the serialization and visualization of the rules. Furthermore, this formal description should be executable, in order to simulate the negotiation process and investigate its compliance with the underlying requirements. As a consequence of such formalization, the negotiation process and the software supporting it may be separated. This paper discusses the requirements for a formalism that is appropriate for capturing negotiation processes. It then presents five major techniques and formalisms for describing such processes and evaluates them according to the requirements. The paper concludes that the Statechart formalism is most suitable for the negotiation types considered.