Integrating static structure and dynamic behaviour to model e-negotiation

Abstract

From the viewpoint of the e-Commercepsilas value chain, negotiations between initiator (buyer, auctioneer) and participant (seller, bidder), including institutional and individual parties, involve several activities. The decision process in negotiation is to get the mutual goal and gain. However, being due to complexity of negotiation process, negotiation of contracts is often still performed manually unsupported by computer systems or just by email. The e-negotiation is the computerized support of negotiation process over the internet. A successful e-negotiation leads to an e-contract. This paper proposes a reference template of e-negotiation based on extended entity-relationship data model (EER) and Interaction Protocol (IP) to express the static structure and dynamic behaviour of multi agents in e-negotiation. The development framework of the EERIP includes three levels, i.e. conceptual level, logical level and simulation and evaluation level. The interface of different level is a mapping from a source model to a target model using a set of transformation rules. Finally, the simulation level is supported by Coloured Petri net (CPN) tools to evaluate the correctness and the adequacy of the model. After validating the e-negotiation model, the e-commerce system can be synthesized further. This paper will apply an example of e-negotiation to validate the feasibility of the EERIP model.