Automated Negotiation Using Semantic Rules

With the extensive adaptation of Web service based applications in dynamic businesses applications including on demand computing, highly configurable virtual solutions and cloud computing based systems demand automated tools for composing and managing these services in composite systems. The use of standard protocols for publishing, discovery, invocation, process definition and SLA definition etc. (e.g. UDDI, WSDL, SOAP, BPEL, WS-Agreement, WS-Policy) has made it possible to compose highly usable composite systems with minimal efforts. On the other hand the existence of a number of functionally equivalent service provide the system designers with the flexibility of choosing the most appropriate services for the system. Hence, automated negotiation among Web services provides an effective way for the services to bargain for their optimal customizations and allow the discovery of overlooked potential solutions. In this paper, we present a Web service negotiation framework that would be used by both the customer and providers of Web services for conducting automated negotiations for quality of service properties of Web services. Our proposed framework is highly flexible, protocol independent and supports participant polices for communication, negotiation and service level agreement creation. We further extend our approach by extending WS-Negotiation and WS-Renegotiation to model multi-round negotiation for multiple attributes of negotiated services in a multi-service and multi-party negotiation scenarios. We also describe a semantic web rules based approach for converting compatible participant policies for mutual comprehension of Web service. We describe in detail the process of negotiating service level agreements using the semantic web rules based approach.