There is a steady shift in e‑commerce from goods to services that must be
provisioned according to service agreements. This study focuses on software frameworks
to develop automated negotiators in open commerce environments. Analysis of the litera‑
ture on automated negotiation and typical case studies led to a catalog of 16 objective
requirements and a conceptual model that was used to compare 11 state-of-the-art software
frameworks. None of them was well suited for negotiating service agreements in open
commerce environments. This motivated work on a reference architecture that provides
the foundations to develop negotiation systems that address the previous requirements.
A software framework was devised to validate the proposal by means of case studies.
The study contributes to the fields of requirements engineering and software design, and
is expected to support future efforts of practitioners and researchers because its findings
bridge the gap among the existing automated negotiation techniques and lay the founda‑
tions for developing new software frameworksMinisterio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2006–00472Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2009–07366Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-2533 (Isabel)Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2007–64119Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-02602Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-4100Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2008–04718-
