A conceptual model for negotiating in service-oriented environments

In recent years, Web services have been developed as a fundamental technique for the new generation of B2B or EAI applications. As they have matured and a new vision of service-oriented computing has emerged, the software industry has shifted its attention from developing required software to delivering desired services. In order to benefit from such a service-oriented model of software, several critical issues must be addressed in a service-oriented environment such as differentiation of services by various attributes, dynamic selection and provision of services in a supply chain style, and commitment of services with prescribed rules. From the managerial perspective, these issues are concerned with a process of negotiating desired services in a service-oriented environment. In this paper, we propose an object-oriented model that specifies such a negotiation process by architectural constructs where these critical issues are adequately addressed. The model contains a use case diagram that depicts requirements for the negotiation process, an architecture diagram that describes collaborative components for satisfying these requirements, and a class/sequence diagram that specifies class objects in these components to perform all behaviors occurring within the negotiation process. For illustration, the model is applied to an exemplified negotiation process for book publishing.