WebNeg: A Genetic Algorithm Based Approach for Service Negotiation

Abstract

Automated negotiation among Web services not only provides an effective way for the services to bargain for their optimal customizations, but also allows the discovery of overlooked potential solutions. A number of negotiation supporting techniques have been used to find solutions that are acceptable to all parties in the negotiation. However, employing these solutions for automated negotiations among Web services has its own challenges. In this paper, we present the design of a Negotiation Web service that would be used by both the consumers and providers of Web services for conducting negotiations. This negotiation service uses a genetic algorithm(GA) based approach for finding acceptable solutions in multi-party and multi-objective negotiations. In addition to the traditional genetic operators of crossover and mutation, the search is enhanced using anew operator called the Norm. Norm operator represents the cumulative knowledge of all the parties involved in the negotiation process. GA performance with the new Norm operator is compared to the traditional GA, hill-climber and random search techniques. Experimental results indicate the practicality of our approach in facilitating the negotiations involved in a Web service composition process. Specifically, the proposed GA with Norm operator performs better than other approaches.