PROJECT OVERVIEW 

The business ecosystem paradigm and consequently Digital Business Ecosystems are a powerful emerging concept aimed at a better understanding of the behaviour of organisations (species) within a specific context and their “coopetition” (a mix of competition and cooperation) and evolution within the ecosystem.

Current negotiation platforms, such as Business-to-Business electronic marketplaces and Internet trading platforms are centrally managed and not yet fully trusted or too expensive for SME’s. Without the support of proper tools, SMEs cannot easily find trustworthy partners to provide needed services. There are several problems in accessing reputation information, the largest being that it is not readily available and negotiations are time consuming. 

 The ONE project is able to learn and evolve with the changing market conditions in an open-source solution ensuring transparency and sustainability. By using the ONE environment, all business players (SMEs, Corporations and others) will benefit from reduction of time to market and transaction costs. The ONE environment will also provide wider ecosystem benefits in terms of an increase in the number of participants; better negotiation performance and collaboration while creating new business opportunities.

SMEs  will be able to extend their portfolio of services, thus increasing their ability to fulfil more complex customer demands.  It will also increase the SMEs ability to identify and successfully negotiate for necessary services from other SME’s. 

The ONE project  is funded by the FP6 Programme.
The project has been running since September 2006, and will be completed June 2009.

PROJECT IMPLEMENTATION

A primary objective of the ONE project was to allow users to easily model business negotiations using a graphical tool and then allow then support the automatic execution of theses models. In order to achieve this, a Negotiation Modelling language (a MetaModel) was created by the TSSG. Since its creation this MetaModel has also been used as an input for the FORWARD project, and as a possible candidate for contribution to standardisation bodies. The ONE MetaModel was completed in early 2008.

The TSSG was also responsible for creating the negotiation execution environment, and achieved this by building upon existing open source business process execution tools (JBPM) and model transformation technology (ATL). This approach demonstrated an innovative way to achieve user created automatically executable models. The ONE platform containing the Exectution Environemt

The ONE platform was built upon a Soapod Peer-to-Peer environment that used conceptual elements of the DBE(Digital Business Environment) project, but implemented using open web standards.

PROJECT ACHIEVEMENT

TSSG has achieved two main goals in this project, creating a reusable Negotiation MetaModel, and creating a reference implementation to execute these models and prove the validity of the approach taken.

For the TSSG these goals were achieved in the publication of the Negotiation Metamodel at DEST 2008, and the trial of the ONE platform in 2009.

PROJECT EFFECTIVENESS

The ONE project has helped to improve the PCS modelling and development skills, specifically in using MDA(Model Driven Architechture), techniques which can be used to in many projects. This project has greatly expanded our knowledge of Business negotiations and this knowledge should be applicable to areas such as automatic negotiation of Service level agreements, and other problems more central to the TSSG.