Abstract

Abstract. Negotiation is a technique for reaching mutually beneficial agreement among autonomous entities. A concurrent negotiation problem occurs when one entity is negotiating simultaneously with several other entities to reach agreement. In the context of Internet-based services, we present a protocol to support concurrent negotiation over multiple issues. By extending existing negotiation protocols, our described protocol enables both service requestors and service providers to manage several negotiation processes in parallel. The protocol allows the negotiation participants to make durable commitments to reduce the occurrence of a decommitment situation. Since colored Petri nets have greater expressive power than finite state machine and support for concurrency, we use them to represent our negotiation protocol and facilitate our analysis of desirable properties. More importantly, our protocol can be analyzed for deadlock, liveness and other faults by using the existing colored Petri nets tools. 1.

Citations