Towards a Smart Webservice Marketplace

Abstract

Electronic contracts are crucial for future e-Business models due to the increasing importance of Web services and the cloud as a reliable commodity enabling service-based value chains. Negotiation is the prerequisite for establishing a contract between two or more partners. These contracts are usually based on Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In this paper we present the framework of a smart Web service marketplace, which allows for automatic, autonomous, and adaptive negotiation and re-negotiation of Web services based on economic principles. Our approach enables market based service trading following a bazaar style and extends the classical supermarket approach typical for service negotiation today. We extend the WS-Agreement standard by feasible workflows to support auctioning for negotiation and re-negotiation. A specific highlight of our framework is the mapping of business strategies defined by economic goals of the respective organization into an ICT enabled framework. It facilitates autonomic agents acting as organizational representatives stipulating SLAs without human interaction. This allows for business transactions transparently to the environment but adhering to business objectives of the originating organization.