Developing e-Negotiation Process Support by Web Services

摘要

Contracts are important for attaining business process interoperability and enforcing their proper enactment. An e-Contract is the computerized facilitation or automation of a contract in a cross-organizational business process. In this paper, motivated by frequently repeated activities of negotiating similar sales contracts, we propose a systematic way to perform negotiation activities over the Internet, in order to reduce the cost and improve the effectiveness of negotiation. This is known as e-Negotiation. We also propose a meta-model of e-Negotiation to allow flexible negotiation support for a variety of negotiation processes, based on e-Contract templates and template variables. Furthermore, we discover a more effective design of negotiation processes by considering partial order among template variables. Based on our meta-model, we outline our implementation framework with Web Services. As a result, flexible e-Negotiation can be supported in a pragmatic way.