Autonomous service level agreement negotiation for service composition provision

This paper reports the authors' recent research in addressing this issue, using the agent technology. In this research, the service level agreements for a service composition are established through autonomous agent negotiation. To enable this, an innovative framework is proposed in which the service consumer is represented by a set of agents who negotiate quality of service constraints with the service providers for various services in the composition. This negotiation is well coordinated in order to achieve end-to-end quality of service requirements. Based on this framework, a new negotiation protocol is presented to support coordinated negotiation. A utility-function-based decision-making model is proposed based on which agents can proactively decide on the course of further actions. Moreover, this paper also contributes the novel design of the negotiation Web service on the service providers' side for the purpose of interoperability. Finally, the prototype implementation for the purpose of proof-of-concept is discussed.