Requirement Driven Service Agent Collaboration and QoS Based Negotiation

Composing existing services for satisfying new requirements has gained daily expanding attentions and interests. Existing techniques assume that services are passively waiting for being discovered and invoked. However, it might be more attractive when services become active entities (service agents) distributed in Internet which can recognize the newly emergent requirements. Generally, some service agents collaborate to satisfy the requirements, and some service agents compete with each other for realizing (part of) the requirements. This is the idea of requirement driven service agent collaboration. Along with our previous work, this paper proposes an agent collaboration model and a QoS based negotiation framework. Collaboration is modeled as an optimization problem, and subsequently enhanced by a QoS based negotiation framework. Through negotiation, the chosen solution satisfies both the QoS requirement and service agents' payoffs.