Towards Agent-Based Coalition Formation for Service Composition

Abstract

The topic of agent-based service composition has been experiencing much attention recently. Researchers are applying agent technology with the aim to improve adaptiveness and flexibility of prevailing static Web service composition solutions. One major characteristic of multi-agent systems in particular is their ability of emergent behavior that allows gaining complex system behavior from small distributed sets of simple rules. This paper describes a multi-agent-based coalition formation approach for service composition that achieves emergent behavior based on a lightweight interaction protocol and decentralized decision making. The paper also presents evaluation results of first experiments to underline the validity of the approach.

Multi-agent Coordination for a Composite Web Service

“…In this context, authors in [9] ensure the composition of web services with the bottom-up approach, where the selection step occurred before the creation of activities plan. Unlike authors in [3], the selection of the web services occurred after the preparation of activities plan.…”

“…The first class is based on multi-agent system. In [3] authors have proposed a multi-agent system for web services composition based on competition between coalitions of services. In this works, each service is represented by a software agent who contacts other agents and offers their services according to their reasoning ability.…”

A Merge-and-Split Mechanism for Dynamic Virtual Organization Formation in Grids

“…The VO formation problem can be viewed as a coalition formation problem. Research on coalition formation has been conducted in the multi-agent systems community for problems such as allocating a task [14] and service composition [15].…”

Coalition formation in multi-agent systems based on bottlenose dolphin alliances

“…Some of these methods, e.g., [7], rely on the availability of central control, while decentralized algorithms, as seen in [8], are usually implemented in a task-oriented environment. Often "user agents" [9] or "auctioneers" [10] are used to advertise the request to create a coalition by other agents in the network and previous research, as seen in [11], has also focused on finding the optimal division of agents through search algorithms.…”