Toward Autonomic Web Services Trust and Selection

Abstract

Emerging standards in Web services enable the development of large-scale applications in open environments. In particular, they enable services to be dynamically bound. However, current techniques fail to address the critical problem of selecting the right service instances to bind. The right service instances would be determined based on user preferences and business policies in a manner that considers their trustworthiness.

We propose a multiagent approach that naturally provides a solution to the selection problem. This approach is based on an architecture and programming model in which agents represent applications and services. The agents support considerations of semantics and quality of service (QoS). They interact and share information, in essence creating an ecosystem of collaborative service providers and consumers. Consequently, our approach enables applications to be dynamically configured at runtime in a manner that continually adapts to the preferences of the participants. Our agents are designed using decision theory and make use of Semantic Web knowledge representation techniques for shared conceptualizations (ontologies). We evaluate our approach conceptually and through simulation experiments.