The IDEAL approach to Internet-based negotiation for e-business

With the emergence of e-business as the next killer application for the Web, automating bargaining-type negotiations between clients (i.e., buyers and sellers) has become increasingly important. With IDEAL (Internet based Dealmaker for e-business), we have developed an architecture and framework, including a negotiation protocol, for automated negotiations among multiple IDEAL servers. The main components of IDEAL are a constraint satisfaction processor (CSP) to evaluate a proposal, an Event-Trigger-Rule (ETR) server for managing and triggering the execution of rules which make up the negotiation strategy (rules can be updated at run-time to deal with the dynamic nature of negotiations), and a cost-benefit analysis to help in the selection of alternative strategies. We have implemented a fully functional prototype system of IDEAL to demonstrate automated negotiations among buyers and suppliers participating in a supply chain