e-service composition: supporting dynamic definition of process-oriented negotiation parameters

In the rapidly changing world of business-to-business (B2B) interaction, the e-service model triggers a new way to design and implement business services. While the capabilities required to implement a service stay constant, the set of companies providing these capabilities can change dynamically. Even when the companies stay the same, they may want to cover different roles at different times. Automating the negotiation processes between companies become crucial. We present a distributed negotiation system, which allows a service provider to dynamically subcontract aspects of its service to other providers and to determine the price to pay each. The system takes the description of the service in the form of a complete business workflow, together with a set of roles that participate in this workflow. Firstly, it decomposes the workflow into a set of process descriptions (projections) specialised for each possible subset of the roles involved in the original workflow. Each projection represents the view a potential subcontractor has over the workflow. The system then conducts a reverse combinatorial auction to allow subcontractors to offer to play a given set of roles, and fulfil the process associated with it in return for a payment.