Negotiating Service Requirements among Strategic Actors

Negotiation is an important activity in both conventional requirements engineering and the new online service era. It encompasses a wide range of functional and non-functional requirements (QoS), including price, performance, security, delivery time, etc. In order to meet service requirements in the open and distributed environment, systems need to be adaptive to the changing needs. In this paper, we propose a negotiation modeling and evaluation mechanism for strategic actors, who have service requirements and capabilities. The strategic modeling approach allows actors in service environments to negotiate for service level agreements including service functionalities and multiple QoS categories; it also includes a generic service negotiation protocol that enables service requestors and providers to select an optimal alternative. Offers are generated and evaluated in accordance to actor’s preferences and best interest. We use typical service scenarios as running examples to illustrate the proposed approach and evaluate its viability.