Introducing coalition stability in multiagent cooperation a coalition approach to service composition in a smart home system

This paper focuses on how to keep the members in a coalition even if more attractive offers are made to some members. A coalition consists of multiple agents cooperating together to achieve a common goal. The ongoing smart home project considers the service providers proactive in order to provide a composite service to satisfy the needs of the users through a coalition of cooperative agents. One of the most important issues of this study is to achieve stability in coalition, because frequent reorganization in a coalition is not desirable. We propose a method of keeping the participants in coalition to avoid the hopping of participants to another coalition. We use the seller and buyer agents as illustration to explain the coalition forming. The concept of profit sharing and subsidy is introduced in making the coalition stable. The research contribution of this paper is to introduce a method for keeping a coalition together and to use the concept of coalition to allow flexibility of cooperation for service providers.