ELECTRONIC BUSINESS SYSTEM

Select an electronic business system

Table of Contents

Introduction3

Electronic negotiations4

An integrative approach to electronic negotiations6

Image egoisst: a negotiation support system for business-to-business electronic commerce9

System architecture10

Presentation layer10

Application layer11

Select an electronic business system

Introduction

An e-commerce transaction in the business-to-business sector follows a general three-phase pattern . Firstly, the business partners need to find each other. Thus, the first phase is that of searching for products and suppliers (on the buyer's side) or for customers (on the supplier's side). Having derived a list of potential partners, the searcher will start talking to one or many companies about contract details. Thus, the second phase is that of negotiating a business agreement. If the negotiations are successful, the outcome will be a business contract that each company needs to process. Thus, the final phase is that of fulfilling the contractual obligations including payment and logistics.

Information technology (IT) can support each of these phases. For example, keyword search or semantic search engines based on ontologies and semantic web technologies can assist companies in finding suitable business partners. Structured exchange of electronic messages or electronic forms (representing offers) or electronic auction models can be the medium for electronic negotiations between the business partners. Electronic payment systems, logistics and scheduling systems, or monitoring systems can be used for processing the contract and fulfilling the contractual obligations .

This paper is about the second phase of a business transaction and deals with electronic negotiation support. In the following section, the three dominant models of electronic negotiations will be discussed. Our integrated approach to negotiation support consists of three integration steps. Section 3 will present the integration steps including the conceptual and formal foundation. These concepts are the foundation for the negotiation support system Image egoisst which forms the core of the paper and will be introduced in Section 4. A typical usage scenario will be presented in Section 5 to illustrate the system elements of Image egoisst. The results of the extensive evaluation experiments will be discussed in Section 6 before concluding remarks and an outlook to future work will be presented ( Section 7).

Electronic negotiations

During business negotiations, the business partners try to arrive at an agreement that is acceptable to both partners. In the simplest case, the interaction consists of one bid by the supplier and a computation of the best bid from a set of competing bids. A more complex process can involve the exchange of various offers, requests, counter-offers etc. and might take place over a considerable number of days or weeks. Electronic negotiations (e-negotiations) can thus be conducted using different negotiation models.

The three main models of electronic negotiations are electronic auctions, negotiation agents, and negotiation support.

Quantitative approaches aim at automating the negotiation process to enable an efficient negotiation process in terms of finding an economic optimum. Both electronic auctions and negotiation agents are quantitative approaches. Electronic auctions work according to the general auction principles, i.e. bids concerning defined criteria such as price are placed on a good to be purchased or sold before a predefined ...