Q-Contract Net: A Negotiation Protocol to Enable Quality-Based Negotiation in Digital Business Ecosystems

The Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) is the result of the co-evolution of the Business Ecosystem and the Digital Ecosystem. There are numerous approaches and enabling technologies which are used in modeling open business marketplaces and, due to the similarities between the Digital Business environments, they can also help to enable the Digital Business Ecosystem but with some limitations. The complete lifecycle of the DBE can be decomposed into the following phases: formation, evolution and dissipation. In this work, our main focus is on the importance of negotiation in the DBE formation phase and especially on the structure of Contract Net Protocol. We will present an extension to the primitive Contract Net Protocol and name it Contract Net with Quality Protocol (CNQP or Q-Contract Net) to facilitate the negotiation process by adding the quality evaluation steps during the negotiation phase of the DBE formation.