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

Intelligent negotiation mechanism for supporting the interoperability within the sensing enterprise

The authors wish to acknowledge the support of the European Commission through the funding of the UNITE, MSEE and IMAGINE FP7 projects, and the European Space Agency - Concurrent Design Facility (ESA-CDF) for their support in the development of the business case presented in this paper.The Sensing Enterprise is a novel concept that refers to an enterprise anticipating future decisions by using multi-dimensional information captured through physical and virtual objects. The Sensing Enterprise concept is shifting focus towards a borderless enterprise, having at its core the collaboration and continuous interactions among smart objects and systems. But in the actual competitive and global business context, the maintenance of the collaboration environment through the interoperation among heterogeneous smart virtual and physical objects in a collaborative organizational environment becomes difficult to achieve. Therefore, in a dynamic context a change in any component of the networked partners affects the others, creating difficulties to sustain operating networked environment. In this respect, this paper proposes an intelligent negotiation framework as a key mechanism to achieve and maintain the interoperability between the organisations' smart objects and applications, and its validation in an industrial scenario. To allow a sustainable, flexible and generic approach towards the infrastructure implementation in global scale, a cloud-based platform is proposed for setting of the Sensing Enterprise framework.publishersversionpublishe

An intelligent system to ensure interoperability for the dairy farm business model

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.Picking reliable partners, negotiating synchronously with all partners, and managing similar proposals are challenging tasks for any manager. This challenge is even harder when it concerns small and medium enterprises (SMEs) who need to deal with short budgets and evident size limitations, often leading them to avoid handling very large contracts. This size problem can only be mitigated by collaboration efforts between multiple SMEs, but then again this brings back the initially stated issues. To address these problems, this paper proposes a collaborative negotiation system that automates the outsourcing part by assisting the manager throughout a negotiation. The described system provides a comprehensive view of all negotiations, facilitates simultaneous bilateral negotiations, and provides support for ensuring interoperability among multiple partners negotiating on a task described by multiple attributes. In addition, it relies on an ontology to cope with the challenges of semantic interoperability, it automates the selection of reliable partners by using a lattice-based approach, and it manages similar proposals by allowing domain experts to define a satisfaction degree for each SME. To showcase this method, this research focused on small and medium-size dairy farms (DFs) and describes a negotiation scenario in which a few DFs are able to assess and generate proposals.publishersversionpublishe

COLLABORATION SYSTEM IN VIRTUAL ORGANIZATION

The purpose of this work is to provide a collaboration support for small and medium enterprises which cannot or do not want to fulfill a major contract alone. In that case, in order to better meet a higher external demand, the managers are willing to subcontract parts of their contracts even to competitors. This approach is illustrated by a business-to-business interaction, being proposed a sample scenario where partners are autonomous gas stations grouped in a virtual organization

AGENT-BASED INTELLIGENT COLLABORATIVE MECHANISM

This paper proposes a collaborative intelligent mechanism to support concurrent negotiations among organizations acting in the same industrial market. Each organization has limited resources and in order to better accomplish a higher external demand, the managers are forced to outsource parts of their contracts even to concurrent organizations. In this concurrent environment each organization wants to preserve its decision autonomy and to disclose as little as possible from its business information. The complexity of our negotiation model is done by the dynamic environment in which multi-attribute and multi-participant negotiations are racing over the same set of resources. We are using the metaphor Interaction Abstract Machines (IAMs) to model the parallelism and the non-deterministic aspects of our negotiation proces

Negotiations Framework for Monitoring the Sustainability of Interoperability Solutions

Part 2: Full PapersInternational audienceThe competition inherent to globalisation has led enterprises to gather in nests of specialised business providers with the purpose of building better applications and provide more complete solutions. This, added to the improvements on the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), led to a paradigm shift from product-centrism to service-centrism and to the need to communicate and interoperate. Traditional segments like banking, insurance and aerospace subcontract a large number of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) that are undergoing this change, and must ensure the criticality and accuracy of their business is not affected or impacted in any way. This paper proposes a methodology and a framework that provide critical businesses a control mechanism over the interoperability solutions in place on their subcontracted enterprises, imposing negotiations which formalise the solutions applied. It then focuses on its application on the business case of the Concurrent Design Facility of the European Space Agency (ESA-CDF)

Collaborative Negotiation for Ontology-Driven Enterprise Businesses

International audienceThe requirements from a globalised world demand that enterprises not only shift their paradigm from product-centrism to component-centrism on integrated products, potentiating the need for tight interoperability dependencies, but also that the products specifications and concepts are fully understood by customers and providers in a transparent manner that surpasses the barriers of language, culture and technology. This paper presents the NEGOSEIO framework, which enables service-based interoperability between parties, closely integrated with semantics and business understanding via the use of reference ontologies in the quest for achieving a stronger interoperability liaison. The paper’s validation and discussion is performed in its application on the ontology negotiation of business environments in the scope of the EU-funded FP7 project TIMBUS for digitally preservation of resources and enduring business continuity

Framework for Ontology-based Negotiation to Support Enterprise Interoperability in Cloud-based Environments

International audienceIn the actual competitive and global business context, the maintenance of interoperation among heterogeneous organisations in a collaborative environment becomes difficult to achieve. Hence, in a dynamic context a change in any of the networked partners affects the others, creating difficulties to sustain the interoperability of the networked environment. This paper proposes negotiation as a key mechanism to achieve and maintain the interoperability between the organisations’ systems and applications, as a supporter for the conflict resolution that typically occurs when the different players discuss and analyse the potential solutions for the interoperation of the integrated business environment. Thus, the presented approach tackles the issue of semantic heterogeneity by introducing ontologies as the main support in the negotiation process. In this respect, this paper proposes an ontology-enriched negotiation framework for sustainable Enterprise Interoperability (EI) and its validation in an industrial scenario. To allow a sustainable, flexible and generic approach towards the infrastructure implementation in global scale, a cloud web-service-based platform is proposed for setting of the framework

Service-based Negotiation for Advanced Collaboration in Enterprise Networks

International audienceInformation systems support organisations to achieve greater efficiency by automating their activities. Nowadays, in the actual competitive and global business context, the advent of enterprise networking has been challenging collaboration, coordination and continuous interactions among dissimilar information systems to adapt and improve them. Sustainability of interoperability among heterogeneous systems regarding sharing information and knowledge in a collaborative dynamic environment is hard to achieve and maintain. This paper proposes a service-based negotiation framework for advanced collaboration in enterprise networks, as a solution to improve the sustainability of interoperability within enterprise information systems. Validation in industrial scenario is presented and discussed