Shapley value based impression propagation for reputation management in web service composition

Reputation is useful for establishing trust between Web service (WS) providers and WS consumers. In the context of WS composition, a challenging issue of reputation management is to propagate a user's impression of a composite WS (i.e., the user's feedback rating) to its component WSs. In this paper, we propose a Shapley value based approach which can achieve fair impression propagation, that is, the reputation of a component WS is never awarded (or penalized) for the good (or bad) performances of the other peer component WSs in the same composite WS. The fairness of the proposed approach is validated through theoretical analysis and experimental results. © 2012 IEEE.