# An Intelligent System to Ensure Interoperability for the Dairy Farm Business Model
## 5 Collaborative Negotiation System
### Negotiation Model
#### 5.2.3 Coordination Components in Open Environment  
The objective of defining the coordination components in an open environment is to allow for the coordination of the constraints among several negotiations that take place in parallel. Consequently, the main functionality of the components is to manage the flow of information coming from outside the current negotiation and, in particular, the information coming from other negotiations in which the considered DF is simultaneously involved. Unlike the coordination components in closed environments, which manage the flow of information among dairy farms within the same negotiation, the coordination components in an open environment manage the flow of information within the same dairy farm but for multiple bilateral negotiations. Considering that middleware does not provide communication mechanisms among the instances of the components involved in different negotiations and, at the same time, the coordination components in an open environment cannot invite other components in a negotiation, we offer these components the ability to connect to particular data structures. This mode of communication is known as the \"blackboard system\". In this regard, for each type of component in an open environment, we propose a data structure. Using these data structures, the components are able to read the information from the external environment and, in particular, the information on the other existing negotiations. Furthermore, they are also able to write in these data structures in order to update the information on the negotiation in which they are involved. The information stored in these structures is necessary to establish the relations of dependence among several negotiations. An example of the necessary information is the identifiers of the participants involved in the negotiations for the coordination of the transport of the negotiated tasks. This information allows for the coordination of the transport procedure among the considered negotiations [47]. A key aspect of this approach is the possibility to specialize the components capable of coordinating this type of dependencies. To validate this approach, we propose the Broker component that provides the mechanism for selecting possible partners based on the information stored in these data structures. The functionality of the Broker component is to find reliable partners who can perform a certain type of task. Its image on the graph is limited to the data contained in the node in which it was connected, but the Broker component additionally has access to the databaseof alliance partners (i.e., which includes name, address, and description of the type of job they can perform, e.g., milk production). In the described scenario (Section 2), the negotiation between DFs is a multi-bilateral and multi-attribute negotiation. We assume that the manager of the DF initiating the negotiation does not specify the possible partners and delegates this task to the infrastructure (i.e., to the Broker component). Thus, the partners will be able to be known only during the negotiation and not at its initiation. The selection process is based on the description of the negotiated task and the tracking of the alliance partners' database. Thus, in Figure 4, the Outsrc component initiates the negotiation by asking the Broker component to find partners who can perform a certain type of task. Broker navigates a search space of partners (i.e., a lattice of concepts generated with FCA) and returns the suitable partners with their satisfaction degrees (defined by domain experts) to Outsrc. Then, Outsrc immediately notifies the NegA by storing the list of partners into an in-memory table. In the following section, we detail the core of the Broker component. Here, we propose a lattice-based Broker component. To select the reliable partners of the negotiation task, the Broker component relies on FCA for visualising and exhibiting the intrinsic structure of the historical data about DFs.