Towards Agent-Based Service Composition through Negotiation in Multiple Auctions
Chris Preist, Andrew Byde, Claudio Bartolini, Giacomo Piccinelli · 2001
Service composition is the act of taking several component products or services, and bundling them together to meet the needs of a given customer. In the future, service composition will play an increasingly important role in ecommerce, and automation will be desirable to improve speed and efficiency of customer response. In this paper, we discuss the technical issues surrounding the automation of dynamic electronic service composition, using a ficticious company, freighmixer, to demonstrate the process. We focus specifically on the issue of appropriate negotiation strategies for service composition, and present the specification of an algorithm to provide a robust solution to these problems in the context of multiple simultaneous auctions. We present a worked example to demonstrate the behaviour of the algorithm, and discuss related and future work.