The still growing omnipresence of the Internet has given rise to doing business in an electronic way: eCommerce and eBusiness have become part of everyday life. The most prominent examples are Amazon, an online book store, and Ebay, an Internet auctioning system. For businesses electronic marketplaces play an important role.

While the business models mentioned above are well studied they have several disadvantages in common:

• The customer is usually not given a chance to formulate her own desires. She can only choose from what is offered.
• Efficiently dealing with variants of product families has not been investigated at all.

These deficiencies are the motivation for the Marrakesch project. But the question remains: What is Marrakesch?

Marrakesch is a powerful eBusiness model for semi-automatically conducting business with configurable and highly complex products. Therefore Marrakesch concentrates on three points:

Formalization of Offer and Demand

For automatically finding compatible business partners a common language for formulating offer and demand is necessary. Marrakesch utilizes a graphical notation called mereological graphs. They are based on variant bills of materials extended by a versatile implication model to reflect complex dependencies. The single components of a mereological graph are linked to a classification tree reflecting the domain and the relationships of the applicable parts.

The mereological graph is the essential data structure for both the information and the negotiation phase.

The Information Phase

The information phase aims at finding a possible pair of business partners. In Marrakesch this is achieved by a publish/subscribe architecture: several participants publish their offers and demands  respectively formulated as mereological graphs to an intermediary broker, the Marrakesch Marketplace. The broker searches for pairs of compatible business partners, i.e. which offer might match which demand. Finding a match is rather difficult because of the dependencies introduced by the implications. Still matching is the only part of the business model that is processed fully automatically. The parties involved in the match are notified and can then go on to the direct negotiation phase.

The Negotiation Phase

While the preceding phase was characterized by an indirect, anonymous communication behaviour the following negotiation phase is determined by the direct interaction between the two participants according to the request/response paradigm: alternatives and differences remaining after the match have to be resolved in a dialog based fashion. Two levels of dialogs can be distinguished: the meta dialog aims at determining a schedule in which order the remaining content dialogs have to be gone through. If both parties can come to an agreement the result is a contract that finally has to be executed. Otherwise both parties return their structures to the Marrakesch Marketplace and wait for a new match.

Defining a model for eBusiness is one thing, evaluating another. Within the Marrakesch project several small to medium size implementations exist for the different phases of the business process. Nethertheless it has always been taken care of that the single building blocks are able to interact. The current set of implementations consists of

• an object-relational database schema storing classification hierarchies as well as the product variant graphs
• a visual editor for designing and modifying classifications and mereological graphs. The results can be written directly to the database or be returned in XML or in ASCII
• several matching components implementing different strategies (ANF, SIRMA, genetic matching, exhaustive search)
• a negotiation component applying the OR-algorithm

Further modules are under development, e.g a web-based configuration tool, i.e. a lightweight version of Marrakesch where the client cannot express her wishes but only choose from variants of given offers.

The prototype is based on Oracle9iR2, Wolfram Mathematica 4.2 and Microsoft Visio 2002.

Marrakesch, in English Marrakesh or Marrakech, is an old town at the foot of the Altas Mountains in Western Morocco. It was founded in 1062 by Yusuf ibn Tashfin, a Berber chieftain, who also invaded Spain. Marrakesch was the capitol of his kingdom and became more and more successful in trading. Nowadays Marrakesch is rather popular with tourists because it managed to keep its ancient character (the streets are simply too small for cars). In the center of the town are the souks, a large maze of markets for fruit, vegetables, spices, clothing and meat. Here a lot of trading and bargaining is going on  - which is the reason for the name of this project.