Component-based Software Protocol Approach

A major challenge in developing an e-negotiation system (ENS) is that the context of negotiations such as negotiators’ characteristics, negotiation processes, negotiation rules, and social implication are different case-by-case. This context dependency makes it difficult to develop a general ENS applicable to wide variety of negotiation problems. In this paper, in order to mitigate the context dependency issue, we propose to adopt the component-oriented software protocol approach to e-negotiation systems and present a framework for e-negotiation protocols that implements this approach. According to this framework, an ENS is developed by designing a high level e-negotiation protocol which specifies the rules on allowed activities at a certain state and the rules on how to change them depending on the activities performed. Then, this designed e-negotiation protocol is executed by a general purpose ENS platform, which integrates software components and executes the protocol. This approach allows one to easily develop or modify ENS so that it can best fit into the context. We prove validity of our framework by redeveloping two existing ENS’s SimpleNS and Inspire – using the framework for e-negotiation protocol model and an ENS platform that understands and executes the defined protocol.