Software Agents to Enable Service Composition through Negotiation

The management of computational resources is becoming a crucial aspect in new generation distributed computing systems like service-oriented ones because of the decentralized, heterogeneous and autonomous nature of these resources. As such they cannot be managed by adopting a centralized approach, but more sophisticated computing methodologies are necessary. In this paper we propose to use software agent negotiation as a means to compose services necessary to provide a new composite service can be provided. In particular, we propose an automated negotiation mechanism to select the service providers that meet the requirements of service consumers on the provision of multiple interconnected services. The negotiation mechanism allows for the evaluation of dependent issues that are negotiated upon when multiple interconnected services are required, and it relies on an iterative process so to improve the possibility of reaching an agreement by letting both service consumers and providers to exchange more proposals and counter-proposals in order to accommodate to the dynamic and changing nature of service-oriented environments.