A Collaborative Service Composition Approach Considering Providers’ Self-Interest and Minimal Service Sharing

Abstract

Service composition dynamically integrates various services from multiple providers to meet complex user requirements. However, most existing methods assume centralized control over all services, which is often unrealistic because providers typically prefer to independently manage their own services, posing challenges to the application of traditional methods. Collaborative service composition offers a solution by enabling providers to work together to complete service composition. However, this approach also faces its own challenges. Driven by self-interest, providers may be reluctant to offer services needed by others, and due to business competition, they may wish to share as few services as possible (where sharing services means disclosing service information to other providers). To address these challenges, we propose a novel collaborative service composition approach that comprehensively considers each provider’s self-interest and achieves service composition with minimal service sharing. First, we introduce a “self-interest degree” model to capture providers’ self-interest. This behavior may lead to service refusal, so we design a service availability prediction method based on a reputation model to minimize rejections. Then, we propose a decentralized service composition method. It utilizes historical composition records to mine empirical rules between requirements and services, constructing a correlations matrix, and collaboratively trains a multi-label classification model with other providers under a distributed federated learning framework. Combining the matrix and model outputs, we design a service composition method and a node coordination protocol that completes service composition with minimal service sharing. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in capturing providers’ self-interest and showcase its superior performance compared to existing methods.