A negotiation is carried out between a plurality of participants. Each
participant defines an invocation pattern. A set of coordinator
parameters are attached to each invocation pattern, where the set of
coordinator parameters define interdependencies between parameters of the
plurality of participants that are shared across their invocation
patterns. A graph is constructed to carry out the negotiation of a set of
actions to be performed by selected ones of the plurality of
participants, with nodes of a first node type that represents a
negotiating context or a second node type that represents a decision
point. The participants construct the graph with primitives instantiated
by the invocation patterns. At least one node in the graph is a decision
point that merges two or more negotiation contexts into a single decision
point. The single decision point combines values of the parameters from
the two or more negotiation contexts.