Towards the Automation of E-Negotiation Processes Based on Web Services - A Modeling Approach

E-Negotiation is the process of conducting negotiations between business partners using electronic means. The interest in e-negotiation is motivated by its potential to provide business partners with more efficient processes, enabling them to draft better contracts in less time. Most of today’s e-marketplaces support some form of enegotiation. Numerous attempts are being made to design e-marketplaces that support more than one negotiation protocol. The main problem in designing these e-marketplaces is the lack of a systematic approach. In our view, the e-marketplace enforces negotiation protocols and therefore should make them available for consultation by humans and for automation by software agents. Separating the protocols from the e-negotiation media is a step towards a configurable e-marketplace. In this paper we address the requirements for modeling e-negotiation protocols. Then we adopt the Statechart formalism as a modeling language and provide descriptions of five commonly used e-negotiation protocols. Finally, we discuss how we move from these Statechart descriptions of the protocols to modeling the interactions between the e-marketplace participants using a web service orchestration language.