Negotiation for Composing Value-added Software Services in Service Centric Computing

The past few years have seen a significant development of service-centric computing. In such a new IT paradigm, software components are packaged as independent, selfcontained, and reusable services that can be delivered and consumed on demand. New value-added applications can be developed dynamically and flexibly by combining and integrating the existing services in order to automate complex business processes and to address the rapidly-changing needs of end users. Given the growing number of services provided by different service providers, many services can offer a similar and compatible functionality with different price, response time, availability, reliability, and other nonfunctional attributes to accommodate different modes of use. These non-functional attributes together are referred to as Quality of Service (QoS), applicable to not only atomic services but also composite services, i.e., services composed of other services. When creating a new composite service based on a user request, the QoS of the resulting composite service has to meet certain constraints to satisfy the end user. The existing works in service composition mainly focus on the methods for selecting component services based on the QoS properties pre-defined by service providers, making it difficult for a service provider to offer services with the QoS properties customized to the requests from different users.Negotiation provides the channel to let service users and providers discuss what is possible at the time of the request. More importantly, when a feasible solution is not directly available on the service market, negotiation can help service users and service providers resolve their conflicts and dynamically reach agreements at runtime. In this project, we aim to develop a method to enable negotiation for service composition. Our method can support the use of the tactics of both concession and trade-off to generate offers not only valuable to service users but also appealing to service providers. The project will advance the state of the art mainly in two perspectives. First, the existing methods to negotiation for service composition are very preliminary. The method to be developed in this project will make it possible to take the full advantage of negotiation for the purpose of flexibly developing new value-added software services. Second, to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first attempt to address coordination of multiple bilateral negotiations and the method developed in this project can help find more novel applications of automated negotiation.