Traditional research in automated negotiation is focused on negotiation protocol and strategy.This paper studies automated negotiation from a new point of view, proposes a novel concept, namely negotiating agent, and discusses its significance in construction of automated negotiation system, with an abstract model formally described and the architecture designed, which supports both goal-directed reasoning and reactive response. A communication model was proposed to construct interaction mechanism used by negotiating agents, in which the negotiation language used by agents is defined.The communication model and the language are defined in a way general enough to support a wide variety of market mechanisms, thus being particularly suitable for flexible applications such as electronic business. The design and expression of the negotiation ontology is also discussed. On the base of the theoretical model of negotiating agent, negotiating agent architecture and negotiating agent communication model (NACM) are explicit and formal specifications for the agents negotiating in an E-business environment; especially, NACM defines the negotiation language template shared among all agents formally and explicitly. The novelty of the communication model is twofold.
