A World Wide Web interface to agent-based negotiation

The work emerges from research started on the CEC R&D project GOAL (Esprit 6283), whose aim was to develop project management tools for extended enterprises, in which participating partners were distributed, heterogeneous and autonomous. As part of this project, we proposed the Cooperation Services Framework (CSF) to support advanced computer-supported co-operative work (CSCW) for project management in extended enterprises. The CSF was intended to be applicable to any open computing environment which spans organizational boundaries, in which there is a networked infrastructure, service providers and service consumers connected to the network, and end users requiring services but not wanting to be bogged down in the details of invocation (e.g. identifying specific service instances, specifying exact parameters, conducting protracted negotiations which are better handled automatically, etc.). We have implemented a demonstrator which uses a form-based World Wide Web (WWW) interface to a distributed middleware system like the CSF, in which a semiautonomous agent negotiates over services with a server via a broker, over the Internet using cgi to connect the WWW server with the middleware