Customer supplier relation: Towards a constraint-based model for bids

During a bidding process, bidders have to submit offers that will suit the best to the customers' requirements. The OPERA project aims at developing method, model and tools to help bidders to develop more accurate offers. One of the major tasks during the bidding process is the elaboration of offers. In this paper, we present a first version of a constraint-based model for offers (bids) elaboration which gathers three types of data: (1) general data characterizing the potential customer and the overall contexts, (2) data defining the technical system and (3) data defining the delivery process relevant to the technical system. The system will be limited to a 3-level decomposition. The process is composed of activities characterized by a couple (resources, workload). Four end user companies are involved in the OPERA project: two in the industrial sector and the two others in the service one.