Electronic contracting is key issue for establishing liquid markets dealing with electronic goods. This paper presents a framework for automatic negotiation between Web services. The major goal of the framework is comprising all necessary components for negotiation and re-negotiation. The capabilities and the components are described both for Web service consumer and provider. The re-negotiation framework is based on independent control loops and associated knowledge bases for consumer and provider implementing specific business strategies. An economic cost model considering variable cost and a business rule repository are main parts of the knowledge bases. Using the concept of autonomic managers gives the framework the ability to act as self governing system. Furthermore the framework can handle auctioning by using predefined workflows as so called auctioning plug-ins.

Top