General strategy support in soft e-business process negotiation

If the purpose of a commercial negotiation is composition of business-to-business e-commerce processes (e-business processes), do any unique decision-support demands arise when using an electronic negotiation (e-negotiation) system? What is the answer when human-driven e-business process negotiation (eBPN), specifically, becomes a necessity? Workflow research already specifies certain tools that allow collaborative design of workflow models by multiple parties. But this paper goes beyond this to describe how peculiar decision-support demands also arise for the negotiation of the other, more "general", terms of such an eBPN contract. It also shows how existing e-negotiation tools lack holistic support for the interplay between "workflow-specific" and "general" strategy. Given this critical gap, this paper presents the "general" strategy-support (GSS) segment of our wider project: "Soft E-business Process Negotiation Approach" (SEPNA). Novel use of multi-criteria decision-making methods in the workflow composition domain and holistic support of the general strategy-support requirements combine as two of its key distinctions vis-à-vis alternative approaches. It specifies re-usable design prescriptions to address this gap, formalized primarily as an object model. Technical feasibility and contribution significance are shown by executing a set of previously unsupported eBPN scenarios on a prototype implementation of these prescriptions. © 2010 World Scientific Publishing Company.