Nicolás Hormazábal

A Negotiation-Style Recommender Based on Computational Ecology in Open Negotiation Environments

The system described herein represents the first example of a recommender system in digital ecosystems where agents negotiate services on behalf of small companies. The small companies compete not only with price or quality but also with a wider service-by-service composition by subcontracting with other companies. The final result of these offerings depends on negotiations at the scale of millions of small companies. This scale requires new platforms for supporting digital business ecosystems (DBEs), as well as related services like open-id, trust management, monitors, and recommenders. This is done in the Open Negotiation Environment (ONE), which is an open-source platform that allows agents, on behalf of small companies, to negotiate and use the ecosystem services, and enables the development of new agent technologies. The methods and tools of cyber engineering are necessary to build up ONEs that are stable, a basic condition for predictable and reliable business environments. Aiming to build stable DBEs by means of improved collective intelligence, we introduce a model of negotiation-style dynamics from the point of view of computational ecology. This model inspires an ecosystem monitor and a novel negotiation-style recommender (NSR). The ecosystem monitor provides hints to the NSR to achieve greater stability of ONE in a DBE. The greater stability provides the small companies with higher predictability and, therefore, better business results. The NSR is implemented with a simulated-annealing algorithm at a constant temperature, and its impact is shown by applying it to a real case of ONE populated by Italian companies.

An approach for virtual organisations' dissolution

Current research on virtual organisations focuses mainly on their formation and operation phases, devoting only little attention to the dissolution phase. These passages typically suggest that dissolution should occur when the organisation has fulfilled all its objectives or when it is no longer needed. This last definition is quite vague and hard to define, as the need for an organisation is not always easy to measure. We believe that, besides fulfilment of objectives, more causes should be considered for the dissolution of a virtual organisation, since an organisation is not always capable of achieving its goals or continuing operations. Organisations can change during their operation, as might the environment in which they operate, and these changes may affect their performance to the point that they should not continue operating. In addition, the causes that could lead to dissolution could affect the formation of future organisations. Considering the correspondence between virtual organisations and real-life organisations, some portions of real-world commercial law related to dissolution can be applied to the virtual world. In this paper we introduce the different causes that should be considered for virtual organisation dissolution, and a case study focused on one of these causes is presented as a way to emphasise the significance of the dissolution process.

On the Management of Virtual Organizations' Dissolution (in Virtual Business Networks)

The dissolution of Virtual Organizations is not just a stage where the commitments between the partners take to an end, but an issue that is worth considering through all the life cycle in Virtual Organizations. This paper gives further light to the model of Virtual Organizations split in several phases, detailing their roles and significance, and explaining from previous experiences why the dissolution has to be carefully planned fairly in advance. The key elements for managing the dissolution of virtual organizations are described, and further evidence on how they can have positive influence to the performance of Virtual Organizations, are contributed highlighting the phase’s significance.

Adaptive business intelligence for an open negotiation environment

Engineering of negotiation model allows to develop effective heuristic for business intelligence. Digital Ecosystems demand open negotiation models. To define in advance effective heuristics is not compliant with the requirement of openness. The new challenge is to develop business intelligence in advance exploiting an adaptive approach. The idea is to learn business strategy once new negotiation model rise in the e-market arena. In this paper we present how recommendation technology may be deployed in an open negotiation environment where the interaction protocol models are not known in advance. The solution we propose is delivered as part of the ONE Platform, open source software that implements a fully distributed open environment for business negotiation.

Virtual Organisations Dissolution

Virtual organisations are created to satisfy requests for complex services, after the creation phase they operate usually until they fulfil their objectives and dissolve the organisation freeing its members from their resource commitment towards the organisation; this is a common virtual organisation life-cycle. In some environments, the services requests may vary over time, having high numbers of requests at some periods requiring more organisations to cover them, resulting on high number of virtual organisations formation processes. But besides the fulfilment, other dissolution causes can be considered. In this paper we present other causes that should be considered, and explain how they can affect on the overall performance regarding the formation costs and services requests assignment. In addition, we present a virtual organisation test platform (VOCODIT, Virtual Organisation and COalition DIssolution Test platform) for evaluate this approach.