THE DESIGN OF DINE - A DISTRIBUTED NEGOTIATION SUPPORT SHELL

The paper discusses the integration of currently commercially available techniques and supporting tools for constructing a specialized groupware application namely a distributed negotiation support system. It presents the different aspects of the integration methods and analyzes the actual design of a DIstributed NEgotiation Support Shell (DINE). The DINE model supports simultaneous, multiple issue, independent, peer-to-peer negotiations. It allows the integration of existing negotiation support techniques which, as opposed to DINE, mostly focus on those scenarios where the negotiation issues are shared by all negotiators. The latter techniques will be used to support the independent peer-to-peer negotiations in DINE. Negotiators may in fact use any tool even without DINE, as long as it supports the same peer-to-peer information sharing protocol. At the same time, DINE is a generalized multiple criteria decision making model where the alternatives to be ranked are compound subsets of negotiated offers. DINE naturally integrates asynchronous and synchronous communication facilities, intuitive judgement and deep knowledge based techniques. The initial implementation is based on the Microsoft Windows environment.