A Negotiation Approach for Inter-organizational Alliances

This paper presents a software infrastructure developed for supporting negotiation activities in concurrent inter-organizational alliances. The IT system offers a collaboration framework which fully preserves the autonomy of organizations grouped in an alliance, while enabling concurrency of their activities, flexibility of their negotiations and dynamic evolution of their environment. The purpose of this work is to provide a negotiation support to the managers of the organizations belonging to such alliances, which combines middleware-level coordination facilities and multi-agent systems support. This approach is illustrated by a sample scenario where partners are print shops grouped in an alliance to better accomplish customers’ requests.