Enhancing the Flexibility of Electronic Negotiation Protocols Using a Workflow Management System

Publication Type

Contribution to conference

Authors

Andreas Schmid

Year of publication

2017

Published in

Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Group Decision and Negotiation

Conference name

17th International Conference on Group Decision and Negotiation

Conference location

Hohenheim

A negotiation protocol defines a set of rules, which governs the communication and decision-making processes of the parties and may e.g. specify the number of participants, their roles, possible actions and the sequence of these actions. Electronic Negotiation Systems (ENSs) often implement only one negotiation protocol or a subset of negotiation protocols. Consequently, these ENSs restrict the range of supported negotiation problems. This paper presents a novel approach to increase the flexibility of electronic negotiation protocols by integrating a BPMN 2.0 Workflow Management System in an existing ENS. The results show, that freely configurable protocols can be executed during the runtime of the ENS. Furthermore, the utilisation of BPMN 2.0 may increase the understandability of negotiation protocols for the negotiators.