Normal Distributions and Multi-issue Negotiation for Service Composition

Software negotiation is gaining an increased popularity as a viable approach to establish agreements between service providers and consumers of QoS-aware Service-Based Applications (SBA) composed of services provided by different agents. In most cases, QoS preferences are expressed as end-to-end quality requirements on the whole application, and different service agents have to provide services with QoS values that, once aggregated, have to meet them. In the present work we analyze the properties of a hybrid iterative negotiation mechanism occurring among a composer agent and service provider agents on the QoS attributes of the required SBA. The proposed negotiation relies on normal probability distributions to model service provider agents, and it allows to model single-issue and multi-issue negotiation within the same negotiation framework in terms of adopted concession strategy, utility and protocol.