Distributing profit of web services communities based on Shapley value

Abstract

Community of Web Service is a society composed by a number of functionally identical Web Services. The communities are regarded as a whole for users in an opening environment and users would pay for services when they invoke Web Service successfully. Communities should distribute the whole profit to all of the providers of Web Services inside after a settlement period. Due to the cooperation among Web Services in a community we treat these Web Services as a cooperative game. In this paper we propose a method to distribute profit based on Shapley value which considers the contribution of each Web Service to community and we then implement an algorithm based on MC-nets to suit the actual situation which we always cannot get complete input for general algorithm of computing Shapley value. We also show our method is efficient and practicable.