To keep up with the competition in digital markets, SMEs need to develop alliances and collaborate together in order to provide joint services and also to address large tenders.

 

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 main objectives may be summarised by the following:

1. To enable the European service market and especially SMEs to be competitive in the global service production market;

2. To provide an affordable, open, decentralised environment, able to self-adapt to the needs and culture of local business ecosystem, supporting the sharing of knowledge via flexible security and trust policies. SMEs can utilise this environment to create contract agreements in order to supply complex, integrated services as a virtual organization (or coalition);

3. To provide a system that could enable the abovementioned actors to access new markets and partners through reduction of entry cost barriers while increasing collaboration.

 

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.

 

ONE is structured into a coherent set of activities with a balanced mix of:
• Research on economic, societal and user aspects;
• Research and development of enabling technologies and methods (driven by the above);
• Design, implementation and integration of software components;
• Trials and evaluation activities.

 

The ONE project has 8 Workpackages:

WP1 - Business Processes and Functional Requirements
The work package goal is to study the requirements as well as the business related aspects of negotiation and trust within an ecosystem and how the adoption of an open, decentralised negotiation framework can impact the way the business is operated.

WP2 - Architecture
This work package aims at transforming the business and functional requirements of WP1 into project specification. The architecture specifies “how” the negotiation environment has to be realised. The architecture dictates the rules that affect the implementation, the reuse, the scalability, the interoperability and the security. Open standards and Open Interface specifications have to be defined as an inside and outside approach to integration and interoperability. WP2 will also define the structural elements that will allow the components to communicate, be deployed, and executed. Based on such specifications the WP will in particular identify and define communication protocols, technologies and patterns.

WP3 - Negotiation Framework will cover the design and implementation of a generic negotiation framework, adaptable to a wide class of application scenarios, through a meta-model-based approach. The focus of the research in this WP will be on defining a meta-level architecture for negotiation, allowing for the description of negotiation. The WP will abstract with respect to auction types, contract types, negotiation process etc, by providing design tools to enable each actor to model its own negotiation processes and strategies or reuse those previously modelled by other actors. Based on such architecture, the WP will develop runtime tools to support the performance of both automated and agent supported negotiation processes.

WP4 - Recommendation and Learning will research and design a collaborative learning framework, aiming at the provision of intelligent support to actors involved in the negotiation (also keeping into account strategies to maximise collective benefit of the ecosystem).

WP5 - Identity Management and Reputation Framework for Trusted Negotiation
Trust and reputation, as well as security techniques, are supporting topics to WP3 and WP4. WP5 will provide suitable models and solutions underpinning reliable and trusted negotiations, needed in an open-decentralised environment. Goal of this WP is also the generation and the management of identity since, to reason about security and trust, it is necessary to solve the authentication problem as prerequisite. All the security mechanisms will be also designed and implemented in WP5.

WP6 - Trials and Evaluation
The WP objective is to test the ONE negotiation environment in a real setting by having a significant number of users, SMEs and SMI (project partner), located in various European countries involved in trials.

WP7 - Project Management

WP8 - Dissemination & Exploitation
The WP main objective is to achieve a broad, public awareness of the project scope and of the cutting-edge research and development carried within it. Of equal importance is to establish the conditions for future and continuative use of the project results by each partner as well as by the entire community (exploitation plan).

 

TSSG are Workpackage leaders of WP3. In terms of technology R&D the areas of most relevance to TSSG within ONE are:

o        Negotiation

§         Languages

§         Models

o        Negotiation Engine/Console

o        Distributed Knowledge Sharing

o        Service Negotiation History

o        Identity Management (WP5)

Summary of outputs

Refereed Academic papers

           

Non-refereed academic papers

Telesca, L., Finnegan, J., Ferronato, P., Malone, P., Ricci, F., Stanoevska, K. “Open Negotiation Environment: An Open Source Self-Learning Decentralised Negotiation Framework for Digital Ecosystems”, In the proceedings of the Inaugural IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies 2007

 

Eduard Muntaner, Josep Lluís de la Rosa, “Using Dynamic Electronic Institutions to enable Digital Business Ecosystems”, in the 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. (ECAI2006). International Workshop on COIN, In Press. To appear in LNAI.

 

Public Deliverables

 

Presentations

IEEE DEST, Cairns, Australia, 21-23 February 2007 “Open Negotiation Environment: An Open Source Self-Learning Decentralised Negotiation Framework for Digital Ecosystems”

http://www.ieee-dest.curtin.edu.au/

         

Partner list:
Create-Net (Center For Research And Telecommunication Experimentation For Networked Communities), IT
Soluta.Net Est Eurpoa SRL, RO
Istituto Trentino Di Cultura, IT
Waterford Institute of Technology (TSSG), IE
Universitat St. Gallen, CH
Service Management International Limited, UK
Coopservice S.Coop.P.A., IT
University of Girona, ES