A Combinatorial Auction Model for Composite Service Selection Based on Preferences and Constraints

Abstract

We propose a novel market-based approach for dynamic composite service selection based on combinatorial auctions. The combinatorial auction model that we developed allows us to incorporate service providers' and requesters' preferences in the service selection process. From the providers' perspective, the combinatorial formulation allows them to express their preferences for offering combinations of services, or bundles. Moreover, the combinatorial model has the potential to lower the overall cost to the service requester as a result of providers offering discounts for service bundles. The proposed model also enables the service requester to express their preferences for the types of bundles by defining constraints over the configuration of the composite service provisioning, and data-cohesion of the bundles. We have mapped the problem to an Integer Linear Programming formulation and performed a number of experiments to evaluate the proposed model. In addition to demonstrating the relevance and applicability of combinatorial auction models for service selection, our experiments show that the cost of the composite service provisioning decreases with having more bidders in the auction; offering more crowded bundles is more profitable for service providers; and achieving high cohesion is more expensive than low cohesion for service requesters.

Simultaneous service selection for multiple composite service requests: A combinatorial auction approach

“…Such an approach does not consider the dependencies between the web services attending a composition. These web services are dependent on each other based on factors such as chronological sequence, execution time, and data [42], or constraints such as technical [43], [44] and business constraints [45].…”

“…A direct auction model is proposed in [47] which is discussed in Section 3.3 as it considers multiple simultaneous CS requests. In the CSS approaches based on procurement combinatorial auctions [10], [44], [48]- [50], the service requester asks the service providers to bid for provisioning one or more of the required services. In both approaches, the set of winning bids, i.e.…”

Geospatial Web Service Sub-chain Ranking and Recommendation

“…The requestors are recommended to buy bundles of services that may have a better QoS performance [4]. Leveraging the combinational auction model, the composite service selection is reduced to an integer linear programming problem and the objective function is defined aiming to minimize the cost for a bundle of services.…”

“…However, if possible (sub-)chains between services are (partially) explored, service chaining can be achieved leveraging these (sub-)chains, rather than studying relationships between services from scratch for each chaining request. Recently, researchers in the service computing domain have investigated extensively the relationship between Web services, and thus promoted the service reusability leveraging identified service sub-compositions (or passages) [4,1]. Generally, current techniques investigate the invocation relations between Web services or the execution status from event logs, construct the service (composition) networks, examine the structural or/and social characteristics of networks, propose solutions to remedy the flaws that may exist in networks (such as negative links and poor connectivity etc), and recommend the ranked list of process fragments for supporting the tasks of process modeling and service composition.…”

Prioritizing and Scheduling Service Requests under Time Constraints

“…In [17], providers could either offer single services or related services in a bundle, and the services are selected based on not only their prices and QoS values but also the desired cohesion level and provisioning configuration of the target composite service as defined by the consumer. Along the same line of [17], [18] and [19] consider bundled service offers as well. In [18], service bundles are offered by multiple providers through the service value network.…”