Automating Contract Negotiation

The automation of contract negotiation requires intelligent agents that can assimilate and use real-time information flows wisely. Electronic markets are information-rich with access to the Internet and the World Wide Web. A new breed o

Monitoring cooperative business contracts in an institutional environment

The automation of B2B processes is currently a hot research topic. In particular, multi-agent systems have been used to address this arena, where agents can represent enterprises in an interaction environment, automating tasks such as contract negotiation and enactment. Contract monitoring tools are becoming more important as the level of automation of business relationships increase. When business is seen as a joint activity that aims at pursuing a common goal, the successful execution of the contract benefits all involved parties, and thus each of them should try to facilitate the compliance of their partners. Taking into account these concerns and inspecting international legislation over trade procedures, in this paper we present an approach to model contractual obligations: obligations are directed from bearers to counterparties and have flexible deadlines. We formalize the semantics of such obligations using temporal logic, and we provide rules that allow for monitoring them. The proposed implementation is based on a rule-based forward chaining production system

Negotiation processes within inter-organizational alliances

This paper describesthe negotiation component of E-Alliance, a software infrastructure defined for supporting negotiation activities in concurrent inter-organizational alliances. The E-Alliance’s main intent is to preserve the autonomy of organizations grouped in an alliance. The purpose of this work is to offer support for small and medium enterprises which cannot or do not want to fulfill a big contract alone. This approach is illustrated by a sample scenario where partners are printshops grouped into an alliance to better accomplish customers’ demands.negotiation, middleware, virtual enterprises, multi-agent systems, interaction protocol

The Semantic Grid: A future e-Science infrastructure

e-Science offers a promising vision of how computer and communication technology can support and enhance the scientific process. It does this by enabling scientists to generate, analyse, share and discuss their insights, experiments and results in an effective manner. The underlying computer infrastructure that provides these facilities is commonly referred to as the Grid. At this time, there are a number of grid applications being developed and there is a whole raft of computer technologies that provide fragments of the necessary functionality. However there is currently a major gap between these endeavours and the vision of e-Science in which there is a high degree of easy-to-use and seamless automation and in which there are flexible collaborations and computations on a global scale. To bridge this practice–aspiration divide, this paper presents a research agenda whose aim is to move from the current state of the art in e-Science infrastructure, to the future infrastructure that is needed to support the full richness of the e-Science vision. Here the future e-Science research infrastructure is termed the Semantic Grid (Semantic Grid to Grid is meant to connote a similar relationship to the one that exists between the Semantic Web and the Web). In particular, we present a conceptual architecture for the Semantic Grid. This architecture adopts a service-oriented perspective in which distinct stakeholders in the scientific process, represented as software agents, provide services to one another, under various service level agreements, in various forms of marketplace. We then focus predominantly on the issues concerned with the way that knowledge is acquired and used in such environments since we believe this is the key differentiator between current grid endeavours and those envisioned for the Semantic Grid

States Buying Smarter: Lessons Learned From Minnesota and Virginia

Profiles successful government procurement practices, including aggregating demand, promoting innovation, streamlining processes, emphasizing price, and strengthening negotiating skills and vendor relationships; challenges; and principles across states

Precise service level agreements

SLAng is an XML language for defining service level agreements, the part of a contract between the client and provider of an Internet service that describes the quality attributes that the service is required to possess. We define the semantics of SLAng precisely by modelling the syntax of the language in UML, then embedding the language model in an environmental model that describes the structure and behaviour of services. The presence of SLAng elements imposes behavioural constraints on service elements, and the precise definition of these constraints using OCL constitutes the semantic description of the language. We use the semantics to define a notion of SLA compatibility, and an extension to UML that enables the modelling of service situations as a precursor to analysis, implementation and provisioning activities

Ground Rules in Team Projects: Findings from a Prototype System to Support Students

Student team project work in higher education is one of the best ways to develop team working skills at the same time as learning about the subject matter. As today’s students require the freedom to learn at times and places that better match their lifestyles, there is a need for any support for team project work to be also available online. Team working requires that the task roles as well as the maintenance roles are taken into consideration, in that social interactions are just as important as carrying out the tasks of the project. The literature indicates that groupware, whilst effective in supporting the task roles, provides limited support for the maintenance roles of team working in the work place. As groupware was not specifically designed for student team working, it provides limited support for maintenance roles in student team projects. Virtual learning environments similarly provide support for completing the task roles. Many researchers have found that students experience difficulties with their team project work that reduce the perceived benefits of working in a team. It is proposed that helping students to agree on ground rules at the start of a project will improve team cohesion. This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of a prototype system to help students to agree on ground rules as they start their team projects. The system was tested with teams of students carrying out information systems team projects, using an interpretive case study research approach. In this case the teams had the additional problem of being composed of students from across three years of their undergraduate degree programmes, so they did not always have prior knowledge of each other’s preferences. We were trying to establish how useful this software tool would be to these student teams, in starting their project work. The findings showed that some of the student teams did find the ground rules function useful, but the team leaders were the ones who most appreciated its potential. The students may use the outputs in very different ways, but even just looking at the ground rules appeared to get team members thinking about their expectations for team working. Student teams do not often start by thinking about norms, but this study shows a positive benefit of encouraging teams to agree on ground rules at the start of their projects

Treatment of palm oil mill secondary effluent (POMSE) using ultrafiltration and nanofiltration membranes

Malaysian palm oil industry has grown rapidly over the last few decades, to becoming the world’s largest producer and exporter of palm oil. This success story however, comes with a greater challenge and equally required more sacrifices in order to maintain the tempo. In the year of 2004, it has been recorded that 26.7 million tons of solid biomass and approximately a 30 million tons of palm oil mill effluent (POME) were generated from 381 palm oil mills in Malaysia [1]. Although different kind of wastes are generated in the palm oil mills, the perceived harmful waste among all the waste generated is the palm oil mill effluent (POME) due to its associated harm if discharged into the environment untreated [2]. POME is a colloidal suspension originating from mixture of sterilizer condensate, separator sludge and hydro cyclone wastewater in a ratio of 9:15:1 respectively [3]. It is a brownish colored, thick liquid that is containing high amount of oil, solids, and grease with high Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) and Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) values. Table 15.1 describes the characteristic of POME obtained from Malaysian Palm Oil Board