DKEM: A Distributed Knowledge Based Evolution Model for Service Ecosystem

Abstract

With the popularity of cloud computing and micro service architectures, various service ecosystems including services, venders, and service-based processes continuously emerge on Internet or in an enterprise. Semantics of services from different venders may be described by distributed domain ontologies. Distributed knowledge brings difficulty to competition and cooperation among services, and hampers the evolution of a service ecosystem. In this paper, we propose a distributed knowledge based evolution model (DKEM) to promote competition and cooperation among services from different venders. DKEM considers stability as key factor in competition, and a stability evaluation model is designed to compute stability of services, venders, and service-based processes according to service invocation histories. Based on the evaluation model, two evolution patterns are given, and they can automatically explore new and more stable cooperation among services by means of runtime self-adaption mechanism. A prototype system for DKEM is implemented and a series of experiments show that DKEM is effective for competition and cooperation among services with distributed knowledge, and, evolved processes have higher stability and response efficiency.