Electron Commerce Res (2007) 7: 189–220 DOI 10.1007/s10660-007-9007-4 Enabling assisted strategic negotiations in actual-world procurement scenarios Jesús Cerquides · Maite López-Sánchez · Antonio Reyes-Moro · Juan A. Rodríguez-Aguilar Published online: 24 October 2007 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007 Abstract In the everyday business world, the sourcing process of multiple goods and services usually involves complex negotiations (via telephone, fax, etc.) that include discussion of product and service features. Nowadays, this is a high-cost process due to the scarce use of tools that streamline this negotiation process and assist purchasing managers’ decision-making. With the advent of Internet-based technologies, it has become feasible the idea of tools enabling low-cost, assisted, fluid, on-line dialogs be- tween buyer enterprises and their providers wherever they are located. Consequently, several commercial systems to support on-line negotiations (e-sourcing tools) have been released. It is our view that there is still a need for these systems to incorporate effective decision support. This article presents the foundations of Quotes, a commer- cial sourcing application developed by iSOCO that, in addition to cover the whole sequence of sourcing tasks, incorporates decision support facilities based on Artifi- cial Intelligence (AI) techniques that successfully address previous limitations within a single and coherent framework. The paper focuses on the computational realiza- tion of sourcing tasks along with the decision support facilities they require. While J. Cerquides ( ) · M. López-Sánchez WAI Volume Visualization and AI Research Group, Departament de Matemàtica Aplicada i Anàlisi, MAiA, Facultat de Matemàtiques, Universitat de Barcelona, Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 585, 08007 Barcelona, Spain e-mail: cerquide@maia.ub.es M. López-Sánchez e-mail: maite@maia.ub.es A. Reyes-Moro ATAMA Solutions, Ildefons Cerdà 14, 2 o , 08172 Sant Cugat del Vallès, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: toni.reyes@atamasolutions.com J.A. Rodríguez-Aguilar IIIA-CSIC, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Campus de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: jar@iiia.csic.es