W-NEG: A WORKFLOW NEGOTIATION SYSTEM

Melise M. M. V. Paula

, Danilo B. Lima

, Luís Theodoro O. Camargo

UNIFAL-MG - Exact Sciences Departament, Federal University of Alfenas, Alfenas-MG, Brazil

Sergio Assis Rodrigues

, Jano M. Souza

2,3

COPPE/UFRJ - Computer Science Department, Graduate School of Engineering

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

DCC-IM/UFRJ - Computer Science Department, Mathematics Institute, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Keywords: Negotiation Support Systems, Workflow, Decision Making Process, Knowledge Management.

Abstract: It has been claimed that there are different methods for solving conflict; however, the main one is to solve

conflicts through negotiations. This paper addresses one of the Negotiation Support Systems developed,

namely NK-Sys and a workflow approach titled W-Neg. Negotiators often attempt to resolve their conflict

through the use of intrinsic activities and their own skills. In W-Neg, we suggest a set of workflow models

to tackle issues that may be conflicting during the negotiation table. As any decision-making process,

negotiations arise from some well known steps. Therefore, the management of activities realized from these

steps can be considered an alternative to improve negotiator’s preparation. In this proposal, workflow’s

technology is aligned with this alternative once the main goal of workflow systems is to provide better

business processes management.

1 INTRODUCTION

Overall, the word “conflict” is considered a

divergent phenomenon that results in damages or

injuries. However, conflict is a natural event present

in people’s lives and organizations and, if well

managed, can also produce benefits to society.

Diversity and opinion exposition engender an ideal

environment to suggest new ideas and innovative

solutions.

Negotiation is one of the best ways to solve a

conflict. During negotiations, even informally, the

negotiator can follow different strategies and

methodologies. However, as a decision-making

process, the negotiation requires a well-done

planning and a special summarization. These

artifacts, allied to strategies to find agreements,

result in better argumentations and facilitate

decisions.

As any decision-making process, negotiations

arise from some steps execution. The management

of activities realized from these steps can be

considered an alternative to improve future

decisions. In this context, workflow’s technology is

aligned with this alternative once the main goal of

workflow systems is to provide better business

processes management.

Therefore, this work aims to present negotiation

activity as a process composed of different “ways of

agreements” which can be managed through a

proposed workflow system, named W-Neg. The

article is organized as the following: section 2

describes the negotiation process considering the

proposed approach; section 3 shows the W-Neg

architecture as well as its descriptions of interfaces

and functionalities. Then, some considerations, the

conclusion and further works are presented.

2 NEGOTIATION PROCESS

Negotiation is an interactive process among two or

more counterparts whose goal is to hold a

distributive agreement, in which each counterpart’s

interests are mutually acceptable (Zlatev and Eck,

2003). In this case, a process can be considered a set

of activities that, when appropriately realized, obtain

certain work’s objective (Araujo and Borges, 2001).

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M. M. V. Paula M., B. Lima D., O. Camargo L., Assis Rodrigues S. and M. Souza J. (2009).

W-NEG: A WORKFLOW NEGOTIATION SYSTEM.

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Artiﬁcial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems, pages

331-334

DOI: 10.5220/0001989703310334

 SciTePress

Analyzing the negotiation’s literature, it is

possible to identify several approaches about

negotiation process schematization (Duzert et al,

2005, Fisher and Ury, 1981, Kersten and Noronha,

1999, Mills, 2000, Lima, Camargo and Paula, 2008).

In this work, negotiation scheme is mapped into

workflows. Every workflow must specify its

activities and how immersed in the negotiation

process the activities are.

Lima, Camargo and Paula (2008) show

negotiation as a process with four basic workflows:

preparation, development, execution and evaluation,

as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Principal Negotiation’s Workflow (Lima,

Camargo and Paula).

The first negotiation workflow is the Preparation.

In this step, it is unnecessary that the counterpart be

present once this phase concerns initial negotiation

researches. As said by Mills (2000), usually, the

difference between success and fail in negotiations is

just correlated with how well the preparation step

was done.

Figure 2 shows the activities designated to this

stream. As observed, these activities do not need a

specific order. All of them were defined based on

theoretical instruments proposed in the literature

about the preparation process.

Figure 2: Preparation Workflow.

The development workflow represents activities

executed when negotiator is already prepared to

interact with other counterparts. Figure 3 depicts

these types of activities.

Negotiation rounds reflect appointments,

discussions and meetings in which negotiators have

to interact to improve the changes of a real

agreement. All information analyzed during the

preparation’s workflow must be considered as an

input to decision making processes

Figure 3: Negotiation Development Workflow.

The agreement can be reached or not depending

on how counterparts proceed in the deal. The

existence or not of a possible agreement depends on

the reserve values and the pretended values of each

negotiable attribute. Thus, negotiator should

thoroughly analyse these values before any

negotiation round.

Once agreement is reached, it is necessary to

formalize the terms settled. According to Figure 3,

this activity is named Contract Development and its

execution is conditioned to the existence of a

possible agreement between involved parts.

The Execution workflow can represent two lines

of different actions: in case of holding an agreement,

it is necessary to verify what was settled and take the

enough decisions to assemble what was negotiated.

On the other hand, if there were no agreements,

the execution step concerns the planning to obtain

gains which were not hold from the actual

negotiation.

Regardless whether or not the agreement was

reached, this workflow corresponds to the plan of

actions to be followed from the negotiations’ results.

In this context, it is import to determine the tasks

which must be executed, the responsible, the rules,

date estimations for beginning and deadline.

During the Evaluation, with or without

agreement, the involved counterparts shall evaluate

the process, starting the activities belonged by

Negotiation’s Evaluation, in which negotiators

introduces their perceptions and judgments about the

finished deal. The activities in this phase are

composed of the evaluation of the obtained

agreement (if does it work), counterparts’ analysis

and the negotiation strategy validation.

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3 W-NEG ARCHITECTURE

W-Neg is a module inserted in the NK-Sys

Software, which is a Negotiation Support System.

In such environment, the W-Neg objective is to

facilitate the management of activities executed

during negotiations and share this information to

improve quality during future decision making

processes. This functionality represents ease as it

aids in the organization of the tasks and stimulates

the execution of still incomplete tasks. (Lima,

Camargo and Paula, 2008).

W-Neg is structured in two modules: the

workflow model and the workflow’s instances

(Figure 4). In the model, the negotiator can find

information about such activities, as depicted in

Figures 5 and 6.

Figure 4: NK-Sys Architecture.

Figure 5 represents the negotiation model defined in

the W-Neg. The negotiator can consult information

about any activities defined in the model, as show in

Figure 6.

Figure 5: A W-Neg’s Workflow Model.

Figure 6: Activity description to develop the BATNA

(Fisher and Ury, 1981).

From the model, negotiator can instance a

specific activity. The actual negotiation workflow is

created, or updated, automatically. Activities are

defined in different colours to indicate which

workflow is correlated. However, activities are

presented following a temporal order, as illustrated

in Figure 7.

Figure 7: An example of Negotiation’s Workflow.

During the activity selection, the negotiator can

fill forms with the enough information to prepare the

negotiation execution, as show in Figure 8.

In the course of the negotiation, some defined

activities are instantiated whenever negotiator

considers necessary. In Figure 7, for example,

during the BATNA examination, negotiator can

create an instance of this activity. However, during

the negotiation, if there is a need to examine this

information again, it is imperative to create a new

instance in the workflow. It is important to

emphasize that the new instance is related to the

previous instance of BATNA. This property reflects

the time perspective of execution of the activities

described above.

From the functionalities described the W-Neg

can be considered as a way to stimulate negotiators

W-NEG: A WORKFLOW NEGOTIATION SYSTEM

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to prepare their negotiations as well as decrease the

chances to negotiator neglects important activities.

Figure 8: An example of negotiation’s round activity.

4 CONCLUSIONS

During this work, several negotiation aspects were

analysed, such as: the preponderant elements to

negotiate, the steps to reach an agreement and

workflows to support these phases. From this point

of view, it was possible to identify two basic

requisites to create a negotiation’s environment: the

support do decision making and the support to the

negotiation process.

The first requisite points to the necessity to

elaborate a decision model which is able to capture

the logic used and the knowledge associated with the

decision-making during negotiations. This

procedure allows the future recovery of these

elements. The decision model proposed in this work

is based on the perspective oriented by the

Prescriptive/Descriptive perception proposed by

Raiffa (1982). This approach suggests that all

prescription must be based on the best possible

description of the negotiation environment.

The article shows that, in the NK-Sys software,

knowledge management is used to prescript the

negotiator’s behaviour through the capture and

reutilization of the knowledge acquired during the

deal. This information capture and organization is

realized from negotiators interactions with

functional mechanisms offered by W-Neg.

The second requirement reflects the necessity to

define a model to support the process that includes

all components needed to support negotiators during

the implementation of negotiation inherent activities.

In this aspect, functionalities described in W-Neg

lead negotiators to take deals based on the problem

solution approach, analysing their interests,

alternatives and options. Besides, the activities are

formally documented ensuring that the process can

be executed according to what was planned,

satisfying the imposed requisites.

At the present time, NK-Sys has been extended

to increase the attraction of cooperation between

bilateral negotiators through tools that support

synchronous and asynchronous written

communication.

It is important to point that the NK-Sys is still

undergoing development. As future work, the

proposal is to extend the functionalities from the use

of other approaches such as the simulation of

negotiation environments to enable negotiators that

use this environment streamline their negotiation

skills.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was funded by UNIFAL, CAPES,

CNPq and COPPETEC Foundation.

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