Using Reference Points for Competitive Negotiations in Service Composition

In a market of services, it is likely that the number of service implementations that exhibit similar functionalities with varying Quality of Service (QoS) will significantly increase. In this context, the provision of a QoS-aware SBA becomes a decision problem on how to select the appropriate services. The approach adopted in the presentwork is to model both service providers and customers as software agents, and to use automated agent negotiation to dynamically select a set of provider agents whose services QoSs satisfy the customer's requirements. The main features that an automated agent negotiation process should satisfy in order to be applied in service composition are discussed concluding that a multi-issue one-to-many negotiation should be used. In such a setting, we show that using reference points for trading off when different provider agents compete to provide the same service, allows to find (near) Pareto optimal agreements if they exist.