Composition of negotiation protocols for e-commerce applications

A company doing e-business needs capabilities to negotiate electronically the parameters of its deals in order to fully utilize the potential of the information and communication technology (ICT). Businesses continuously engage in interactions of competitive or cooperative nature. This paper focuses on the specification and the composition of negotiation protocols. In particular, we specify and implement a cooperative alliance protocol and we compose it with an auction protocol. We require a specification and implementation language that allows the following two properties of negotiation protocols: (a) compositional construction and (b) dynamic reconfiguration. We apply the Reo coordination language to demonstrate that one can implement and compose together negotiation protocols possessing the desired properties.