A Software Infrastructure for Negotiation within Inter-organisational Alliances

In this paper we present the negotiation component of EAlliance, a software infrastructure we are defining to support negotiation activities in concurrent inter-organisational alliances. Our baseline is to offer a collaboration framework which fully preserves the autonomy of organisations grouped in an alliance, while enabling concurrency of their activities, flexibility of their negotiations and dynamic evolution of their environment. We propose a negotiation support to the managers of the organisations belonging to such alliances, which combines middlewarelevel coordination facilities and multi-agent systems technologies. We present our approach in the context of a sample scenario of an alliance where partners are printshops capable of (out/in)sourcing print jobs among them for better accomplishing their customers' requests.