Negotiation Platform for Supporting Multi-issue Bilateral Negotiations: The Case of an Offshore Wind Energy Company and a Fishing Community in the Northeast of Brazil

This paper presents the development of an electronic negotiation platform to support multi-issue bilateral negotiation situations. The proposed platform has an embedded module for preferences elicitation based on the FITradeoff multicriteria method, to support negotiators with the evaluation of candidate packages when proposing offers or when deciding whether to accept or not an offer from its counterpart. The design and structure of the platform are described in detail in this paper. In order to illustrate the applicability of the proposed platform, a negotiation problem concerning the use of maritime areas in the Northeast region of Brazil is presented. The results of a negotiation between an Offshore Wind Turbine (OWT) company and a Fishing community is presented, in which conflicts with respect to four issues were dealt and a total of 256 packages were involved. After 7 negotiation rounds, an agreement was reached, and a post-settlement analysis was performed to verify the efficiency of the agreement package.