Modeling User Expectations & Satisfaction for SaaS Applications Using Multi-agent Negotiation

As more personal and interactive applications are moving to the cloud, modeling the end-user expectations and satisfaction is becoming necessary for any SaaS provider to survive and thrive in today's competitive market. However, most of existing works addressing cloud elasticity management adopt a centralized approach where user preferences are mostly overlooked. Based on evidence from the fields of customer expectation management and psychophysics, in this article we propose a personal user model to represent end-user satisfaction and her expectations. To integrate the end-user into the decision loop we develop multi-agent negotiation architecture in which the end-user model is embodied by a personal agent who negotiates on her behalf. The results of the evaluation process show that automated negotiation provides a useful platform to empower the user choices, fulfill her expectations, and maximize her satisfaction hereby outperforming centralized approaches where the provider acts in a unilateral manner.