| As the scope of e-business and e-commerce becomes broader, electronic negotiation (e-negotiation) practice requires more attention through rigorous research by the academic community. Most of the research conducted today in the field of e-negotiation focuses on automated negotiation through strategy-enabled software agents, and on studying new agent and multi-agent frameworks that incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) learning techniques.;The focus of this thesis is on the design, implementation, and deployment of e-negotiation servers, including: (1) a thorough study and classification of existing research projects on e-negotiation servers based on their design characteristics; (2) the specification of requirements for a generic e-negotiation server; (3) the design, development, deployment and testing of a generic e-negotiation server using a service oriented architecture (SOA) approach. We use a web service orchestration language to model and enact negotiation processes. The choice of an SOA approach is justified by the need to facilitate inter-organizational integration, in which business negotiation plays an important role.;To validate our design framework we implemented an e-negotiation server using BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). We used the server to model and enact several negotiation scenarios. This enabled us to identify guidelines and templates that make the modeling task easier and more systematic.;One of the fundamental issues consists of devising a systematic design framework for e-negotiation platforms that support the interactions of these software agents. Ideally, such platforms should enable various negotiation protocols and offer high flexibility in specifying, implementing, and deploying them. The study of a properly defined e-negotiation platform or server is very critical, yet not enough research is being conducted in this field. |
