Workflow Modeling of Combined Negotiations in E- Commerce

Workflow management is seen as one of the enabling technologies for ecommerce. Together with software agent technology, they reduce the costs and inconveniences of manual e-commerce transactions. This is partly due to the high dependability of workflow management, and to the nature of software agents, which are capable of exhibiting an autonomous, proactive, social, and adaptive behaviour. In a Combined Negotiation (CN), a consumer is interested in a package of interdependent items, and for that, participates in separate negotiations for all these items. The negotiations take place in separate markets, and possibly obey to different rules. We aim to provide a Combined Negotiation Support System (CNSS) to help the consumer model the CN by specifying the sequencing of the individual negotiations and the dependencies between them. Modeling the CN is a first step towards tackling its complexity, and towards ensuring that it will be conducted according to a well thought plan. The CNSS is then used to run the CN by enacting the model. The consumer also uses the support tool to control, track, and monitor the progress of the CN, as well as the individual negotiations. We designed and implemented a CNSS that we call CONSENSUS, based on a Workflow Management System (WfMS). At build-time, the CN is modeled as a workflow, and at run-time, software agents participate in individual negotiations as actors in the workflow. Coordination between agents is implemented using rule-engine technology. 1 This research is supported by Bell Canada, BCE Emergis, NSERC (National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada), and CIRANO (Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche en ANalyse des Organisations) Although the main focus of the paper is the modeling aspect of a CN, we review the features of workflows and workflow management systems that are relevant to our work. We also define precisely the notion of combined negotiations and the issues surrounding them. Finally, we detail our latest version of CONSENSUS and show how we use it to model and enact CNs.