Negoisst: یک سیستم پشتیبانی مذاکره برای مذاکرات الکترونیکی بنگاه به بنگاه در تجارت الکترونیک

Electronic negotiations can range from simple offer exchanges to complex communicative acts concerning packages of products and services. In contrast to dominant approaches aiming at automating the negotiation process (e.g. auction models), we introduce the notion of negotiation support for human negotiators conducting complex electronic negotiations. The negotiation support system Negoisst for business-to-business electronic commerce is presented that is based on theories of communication and information systems and that combines communication and document management. Negoisst has been successfully validated for e-negotiations in the construction industry.

An e-commerce transaction in the business-to-business sector follows a general three-phase pattern [33] and [38]. Firstly, the business partners need to find each other. Thus, the first phase is that of searching for products and suppliers (on the buyer’s side) or for customers (on the supplier’s side). Having derived a list of potential partners, the searcher will start talking to one or many companies about contract details. Thus, the second phase is that of negotiating a business agreement. If the negotiations are successful, the outcome will be a business contract that each company needs to process. Thus, the final phase is that of fulfilling the contractual obligations including payment and logistics. Information technology (IT) can support each of these phases. For example, keyword search or semantic search engines based on ontologies and semantic web technologies can assist companies in finding suitable business partners [2] and [16]. Structured exchange of electronic messages or electronic forms (representing offers) or electronic auction models can be the medium for electronic negotiations between the business partners [4] and [22]. Electronic payment systems, logistics and scheduling systems, or monitoring systems can be used for processing the contract and fulfilling the contractual obligations [29] and [45]. This paper is about the second phase of a business transaction and deals with electronic negotiation support. In the following section, the three dominant models of electronic negotiations will be discussed. Our integrated approach to negotiation support consists of three integration steps. Section 3 will present the integration steps including the conceptual and formal foundation. These concepts are the foundation for the negotiation support system Negoisst which forms the core of the paper and will be introduced in Section 4. A typical usage scenario will be presented in Section 5 to illustrate the system elements of Negoisst. The results of the extensive evaluation experiments will be discussed in Section 6 before concluding remarks and an outlook to future work will be presented (Section 7).

In this paper, we presented the negotiation support system egoisst that enables complex electronic negotiations conducted by human negotiators. egoisst is based on the DOC.COM framework and integrates communication management, cooperative document management, and content specification via message categories. The system has been successfully validated for the construction industry where it is used for cooperative construction teams [35]. Our future work is concerned with opening the application and integrating it with the other two transaction phases on an electronic marketplace, namely search and fulfilment. In the SEWASIE (Semantic Webs and Agents in Integrated Economies) project, the goal is to integrate the negotiation support of Negoisst into (commercial) search engines to enable a dynamic product specification in the negotiation phase on the basis of the data provided by the semantic search [37]. Furthermore, we work towards combinations with the other models of electronic negotiations. In particular, a negotiation can start with an auction to find out the most suitable business partners with whom complex negotiations can then commence using Negoisst. Furthermore, Negoisst will be integrated into the fulfilment phase. A negotiation process can be seen as a part of a long-term customer relationship management aiming at increasing customer loyalty. Furthermore, if the aim is to reach a global optimum of inter-organisational processes such as in supply chain management systems, negotiations are a part of these processes but need to be integrated into the larger picture.