Dear GRAAP – Working Group,

 my name is Sebastian Hudert and I am affiliated with the Department of

 Information Systems Management at the University of Bayreuth. I have

 been working on a negotiation framework for WS-Agreement together with

 Dr. Heiko Ludwig (IBM Research) and Prof. Guido Wirtz (University of

 Bamberg). After meeting Wolfgang Ziegler at the CoreGRID Integration

 Workshop he suggested to introduce our ideas to the GRAAP – WG in order

 to contribute to the WSAgreementNegotiation standard.

 Our main idea was to create a framework with which not only one

 particular negotiation protocol (e. g. an English Auction) can be

 executed, but one that allows for a variety of different negotiation

 protocols to be used according to the particular situation the system is

 in. We proposed an XML-based language that can be used to define a

 negotiation protocol in a machine-processable manner. A protocol

 description, coded as an XML document, therefore represents all the

 input needed by a service requestor or provider in order to take part in

 the particular negotiation process.

 Using the derived data structure we propose a two-staged negotiation

 process:

 1.       Exchange process: During this phase a negotiation protocol

 description document is created (possibly based on pre-defined protocol

 types and referring to a given WS-Agreement Template) and distributed to

 the future negotiators within the system. This process is implemented as

 a set of simple interfaces and valid method invocation sequences in

 analogy to the WS-Agreement standard itself.

 2.       Negotiation process: After supplying all negotiators with the

 protocol description these nodes engage in the actual negotiation

 process. We propose a set of generic interfaces able to cope with all

 negotiation protocols that can be described with the description

 language we defined.

 This way the logical steps from an initial need for a resource or the

 will to sell one to reaching a valid WS-Agreement are:

 Protocol Definition (XML-based Documents) à Exchange of protocol

 description to future negotiators (Exchange process) à Negotiation

 (Negotiation process) à Agreement formation

 I included a Paper presented at KIVS ’07 on this topic. We hope that you find our ideas an

 interesting input for the ongoing standardization effort. I will attend

 the OGF 23 in Barcelona which would also be a possibility for me to

 present our work in the working group session, if there is interest among the WG.

 Best Regards,

 Sebastian Hudert

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Sebastian Hudert

Dipl. Wirtsch.Inf.

Department of Information Systems Management

University of Bayreuth

Universitaetsstr. 30

95447 Bayreuth

Building Applied Informatics

Tel: +49 921 557665

Fax: +49 921 557662