A NEGOTIATION FRAMEWORK FOR ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Abstract

In the last few years there has been a growing need for organizations to build cooperative information systems. These organizations and their processes that manipulate vast quantities of information are based on heterogeneous, distributed and autonomous data sources. However, without appropriated techniques of negotiation, any execution of organizational information systems would yield to disjoining and error-prone behavior, while requiring excessive effort to build and maintain. In this paper, we present a flexible negotiation framework, which is based on social constraints and conversation plans. The infrastructure of this framework may well fit the negotiation needs of organizational information systems in a highly dynamic and unpredictable environment. This framework has been implemented as a negotiation service in our cooperative application environment. Some examples are given from manufacturing applications.