Multi-agent system approach to context-aware coordinated web services under general market mechanism

Web services have been emerging as a new business opportunity over the last few years. However, these web services are still passive, often lacking rich representations and rich strategies to attract customers. This paper proposes a context-aware coordinated web service mechanism for autonomous and intelligent service provision. Multi-agent intelligent architecture is adopted to coordinate web services that are federated in a web service coordinator, which is also an agent. To provide more effective advertisement and at the same time guarantee higher profits, case-based reasoning is applied to automatically estimate user preferences. We describe a proof-of-concept prototype that was developed using JATLite. Using a simulation-based experimental study performed with an illustrative example, we found that our mechanism with multi-agents yields higher levels of user preference, higher overall profit across all federating merchants, and an increased rate of wins than current web services mechanisms, which do not include these features.