14. A system, comprising: a supply chain network that produces one or more items comprising: one or more sites comprising one or more shipping locations for the one or more items; one or more resources comprising one or more capacities; one or more buffers; and a demand from one or more trading partners for the one or more items; and a meta-model negotiation service (MMNS) comprising one or more computers comprising a processor and a non-transitory computer-readable medium, that generates a machine-actionable collaboration standard, the MMNS configured to: provide a first set of one or more meta-model elements comprising one or more supply chain elements, the one or more supply chain elements comprising one or more site supply chain elements representing the one or more sites, one or more resource supply chain elements representing the one or more resources, and one or more buffer supply chain elements representing the one or more buffers; provide a second set of one or more meta-model elements that represent the semantics of the machine-actionable collaboration standard, the semantics comprising a nature of a demand signal representing the demand and a software protocol used to communicate the demand signal; incorporate more than one meta-model elements selected from the first and second sets of meta-model elements into a trading partner agreement comprising a negotiated meta-model, the negotiated meta-model comprising a private collaboration standard unique to the trading partners for collaboration between the trading partners; provide the trading partner agreement over a computer network to the two or more trading partners; facilitate negotiation of the selected meta-model elements between the trading partners and determine the semantics of the negotiated meta-model subsequent to negotiation of the meta-model, the semantics capable of being understood by collaboration software associated with each of the trading partners independent of any modification of the collaboration software; and and automatically collaborating with the one or more other trading partners based on the collaboration standard reflected in the negotiated meta-model; and in response to receiving over the computer network the demand signal for the one or more items based on the negotiated meta-model and in accordance with the semantics of the collaboration standard, ship the one or more items by at least one of the one or more trading partners in accordance with the demand and the negotiated meta-model.
15. The system of claim 14 , wherein the negotiated meta-model is machine-actionable and reflects a private, differentiated standard for collaboration customized for particular needs of the one or more trading partners.