A Web services-enabled marketplace architecture for negotiation process management

As the eBusiness environment becomes more pervasive and dynamic, negotiations between companies are required more frequently than ever. Despite its potential value and the progress in research, the adoption of negotiation systems has been slow in practice. We believe one reason for this is insufficient consideration of process management aspects such as process design, description, and deployment. Business negotiations must be approached from the process management perspective since they take place in the context of corporate processes such as procurement or sales. In this paper, we study system support and automation of business-to-business (B2B) negotiations from the process management perspective. We propose a Web Services-enabled marketplace architecture for negotiation process management and refine it by adding pattern-based process composition. We validate the concept by implementing the proposed architecture using BPEL4WS and evaluating it from various perspectives.