How High Should We Go? Determining Reservation Values to Negotiate Successfully for Composite Software Services
Authors: Sun, Sherry X.; Zhao, Jing; Sarkar, Sumit
Journal: Information Systems Research (2017)
<jats:p> In the paradigm of service-centric computing, new value-added applications can be developed dynamically and flexibly by combining and integrating existing services. While software applications are traditionally specified and implemented as a set of functions uniform to all users, this new paradigm allows the same software service to be delivered with a different price, response time, availability, and other nonfunctional attributes to accommodate different modes of use. These nonfunctional attributes together are referred to as Quality of Service (QoS). When creating a new composite service, negotiation makes it possible for a service provider to offer the service with the QoS properties customized to the needs of a user. Automated negotiation tactics require the specification of reservation values for the QoS attributes. We present a methodology that determines the reservation values a user (or broker) should use for each component service based on the user’s minimum requirements for the composite service. Our methodology maximizes the chance of reaching a successful negotiation outcome while staying within the user’s reservation values for the composite service. We show…