An Effective Strategy for the Flexible Provisioning of Service Workflows
OA Location
Author(s)
Stein, Sebastian
Payne, Terry R
Jennings, NR
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Recent advances in service-oriented frameworks and semantic Web technologies have enabled software agents to discover and invoke resources over large distributed systems, in order to meet their high-level objectives. However, most work has failed to acknowledge that such systems are complex and dynamic multi-agent systems, where service providers act autonomously and follow their own decision-making procedures. Hence, the behaviour of these providers is inherently uncertain - services may fail or take uncertain amounts of time to complete. In this work, we address this uncertainty and take an agent-oriented approach to the problem of provisioning service providers for the constituent tasks of abstract workflows. Specifically, we describe an algorithm that uses redundancy to deal with unreliable providers, and we demonstrate that it achieves an 8-14% improvement in average utility over previous work, while performing up to 6 times as well as approaches that do not consider service uncertainty. We also show that our algorithm performs well in the presence of inaccurate service performance information.
Editor(s)
Huang, Jingshan
Kowalczyk, Ryszard
Maamar, Zakaria
Martin, David
Mueller, Ingo
Stoutenburg, Suzette
Sycara, Katia
Date Issued
2007
Citation
2007, LNCS 4, pp.16-30
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Start Page
16
End Page
30
Volume
LNCS 4
Identifier
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/263719/
Source
The Workshop on Service-Oriented Computing: Agents, Semantics, and Engineering (SOCASE 2007)
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science, Theory & Methods
Computer Science
Artificial Intelligence & Image Processing
08 Information And Computing Sciences
Notes
Event Dates: May 14, 2007
Publication Status
Unpublished