Electronic Negotiations in a Highly Concurrent Environment

In the context of economy globalization, the need for globally distributed negotiations involving a high number of negotiators communicating through the Internet becomes an important business issue. In such negotiations, the amount of information describing the negotiation process is too high to be easily understood by humans. In this paper, a negotiation support model adapted to highly concurrent environments is presented. The proposed model consists of a multiversion contract model and a multi-facet hierarchical analysis mechanism. The history of negotiation positions of different negotiators is modeled by a sequence of contract versions authored by them. Agreements between negotiators are modeled by shared contract part versions. The multi-facet hierarchical analysis mechanism provides synthesized views of the negotiation process. In this mechanism, mapping functions extract abstract objects corresponding to structured information concerning the negotiation process, which are further classified by a hierarchical classification algorithm basing on ultrametrics.