Semantic Support for Automated Negotiation with Alliances

Companies can form alliances on the Internet to aggregate buying or selling power and create value. More concretely, together resources are shared or new possibilities are exploited that cannot be exploited individually. Most alliances are formed as a result of a negotiation process between the companies that form an alliance. This paper proposes a software framework that enables automated negotiation between alliances. Our framework allows for the semantic description of negotiation objects and their attributes, and provides a mean for the exchange of negotiation messages unambiguously interpretable by all parties involved. The proposed framework supports ad-hoc alliances by allowing parties with a common interest to negotiate on the proposal they want to make to other market participants first.