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Negotiations are a central aspect of commercial transactions in general, and e-commerce transactions in particular. The
automation of negotiation processes has the potential to streamline e-commerce transactions by providing higher
availability and lower processing times than those that can be achieved in manual negotiations. However, the automation
of negotiation processes requires that the negotiating parties express their preferences and attitudes in a
machine-executable way. We have investigated the combination of two formal languages, Defeasible Logic and Statecharts,
as a framework for expressing negotiation strategies. The validation of the proposal was conducted through case studies.
The results show that although the combination of these two languages provides a very expressive framework for describing
negotiation strategies, its suitability can be questioned. In particular, the ability to express quantitative constraints
and preference requires some extensions to Defeasible Logic. This has been pointed out as a direction for future
fundamental research. |