Self-Organizing Agents for Service Composition in Cloud Computing

Abstract

In Cloud service composition, collaboration between brokers and service providers is essential to promptly satisfy incoming Cloud consumer requirements. These requirements should be mapped to Cloud resources, which are accessed via web services, in an automated manner. However, distributed and constantly changing Cloud-computing environments pose new challenges to automated service composition such as: (i) dynamically contracting service providers, which set service fees on a supply-and-demand basis, and (ii) dealing with incomplete information regarding Cloud resources (e.g., location and providers). To address these issues, in this work, an agent-based Cloud service composition approach is presented. Cloud participants and resources are implemented and instantiated by agents. These agents sustain a three-layered self-organizing multi-agent system that establishes a Cloud service composition framework and an experimental test bed. The self-organizing agents make use of acquaintance networks and the contract net protocol to evolve and adapt Cloud service compositions. The experimental results indicate that service composition is efficiently achieved despite dealing with incomplete information as well as coping with dynamic service fees.