e-Alliance: a software infrastructure for concurrent inter-organisational alliances

In this paper we introduce e-Alliance, a software infrastructure we are defining for supporting negotiation activities in concurrent inter-organisational alliances. e-Alliance main intent is to preserve autonomy of organisations within an alliance while enabling concurrency of their activities, flexibility of their negotiations and dynamism/evolution of their environment. The IT infrastructure we propose combines different technologies, such as software engineering techniques, middleware-level coordination facilities and multi-agent systems support. We present our approach in the context offered by a sample scenario where business-tobusiness interactions hold among printshops grouped into an alliance to better answer customers’ demands.