Negotiation, FITradeoff, Eletronic Negotiation System
This work aims to present the design and architecture of a bilateral electronic negotiation platform based on the use of the FITradeoff method for eliciting the preference of negotiators. In the negotiation context, platforms that support the negotiation process are still very limited, specially making use of partial information to capture the preferences the negotiators until the establishment of an agreement, so this limitation is one of the main motivations for the development of this research. Another important critical point to be highlighted in the existing platforms is the fact that, although some of them use the additive model approach to find scores for the packages, the way in which the elicitation of negotiators' preferences is realized to determine the values of the scale constants of the questions are still associated with weights, and these should not reflect the degree of importance of the issues, so that a challenge arises to overcome this problem. Therefore, the purpose of the platform is to provide the user with the possibility of using partial information to elicit their preferences in order to find partial and/or complete results until an agreement is reached in their negotiations with less cognitive effort required from the parties as well as making the process more flexible and interactive. In addition, the platform creates an environment that makes it possible to exchange offers and messages throughout the negotiation until a satisfactory result is obtained for both parties and, to facilitate the process, various graphic features for monitoring and supporting the negotiation are also incorporated. To validate the use of the platform, a simulation experiment was carried out in in order to test the usability of the platform, suggesting contributions to improve the support for electronic negotiations.