A Reputation-Based Approach to Self-Adaptive Service Selection

Service-orientation provides concepts and tools for flexible composition and management of largescale distributed software applications. The automated run-time management of such loosely coupled software systems, however, poses still major challenges and is therefore an active research area, including the use of novel computing paradigms. In this context, the dynamic and adaptive selection of best possible service providers is an important task, which can be addressed by an appropriate middleware layer that allows considering different service quality aspects when managing the adaptive execution of distributed service workflows dynamically. In such an approach, service consumers are enabled to delegate the adaptive selection of service providers at run-time to the execution infrastructure. The selection criteria used are based on the cost of a service provision and the continuous, dynamic evaluation of reputations of providers, i.e. maintained track records of meeting the respective service commitments. This paper discusses the design and operating principle of such an automatic service selection middleware extension. Its ability to balance different quality criteria for service selection, such as service cost vs. the reliability of provision, is empirically evaluated based on a multi-agent platform approach.