Self-adjusting trust and selection for web services

Abstract

Service-oriented architectures enable services to be dynamically selected and integrated at runtime, thus enabling system flexibility and adaptiveness - autonomic attributes that are key for modern business needs. However, current techniques provide no support for actually making rational selections, which are key to accomplishing autonomic behavior. We develop a multiagent framework based on an ontology for QoS and a new model of trust. The agents form an ecosystem in which they help each other select services best matching their preferences. We evaluate by simulation the agents' effectiveness in maintaining self-adjusting trust.