Towards Open Decentralized Self-Learning Negotiation Environment for Business Ecosystems

Abstract

The growing diffusion of outsourcing and insourcing practices in companies life motivated by enterprise efficiency, costs reduction policies and the increasing market dynamicity have motivated the need of distributed service oriented information systems. The Business Ecosystems (BEs) concept defined by James Moore to describe the evolving interaction of business world elements, is taking advantage of the Web 2.0 and B2B networking systems paradigms. These technologies have enabled enterprises to efficiently cooperate in the digital world towards the creation of Digital Ecosystems (DEs). An essential element of DEs is represented by the negotiation of alliances, which enable companies to join competences as well as services and products into a complex offering. This paper describes the Open Negotiation Environment (ONE) project who's aim is to empower the DEs vision with a distributed multi-party multi-issue negotiation platform. ONE will provide sophisticated negotiations processes and supporting tools, enriched by learning and optimisation capabilities. With this approach, ONE will permit an DE to dynamically package and compose complex services through negotiating alliances of loose networks of suppliers, distributors, and outsourcers; makers of related products or services; providers of relevant technology; and other organizations, that could evolve over time.