Multiagent System for DynamicWeb Services Selection

Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) promise to enable the creation of business applications from independently developed and deployed services—roughly, software components that encapsulate and provide business functionality through standardized interfaces. A key advantage of SOAs is that they enable services to be dynamically selected and integrated at runtime, thus enabling system flexibility and adaptiveness—autonomic attributes that are key for modern business needs. However, current techniques provide no support for actually making rational selections, which are key to accomplishing autonomic behavior.

We develop a multiagent framework based on an ontology for QoS and a new model of trust. The ontology provides a basis for providers to advertise their offerings, for consumers to express their preferences, and for ratings of services to be gathered and shared. The ratings are essential, because they give an empirical basis for the selection of services. The ratings are quality-specific and are obtained via automatic monitoring or, if appropriate, user input.

The agents thus form an ecosystem in which they help each other. We show how this approach matches the well known self-* traits of autonomic computing, and introduce the notion of self-adjusting trust. We empirically evaluate the resulting system via simulation. Our results show that the agents are able to dynamically adjust their trust assignments and thus continually select the best available services for their consumers’ needs.

By: E. Michael Maximilien; Munindar P. Singh

Published in: RJ10344 in 2005

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