TASC: A Model for Trusted and Autonomic Service Cooperation

In an e-service environment, e-contract is one of the important ways to support autonomic service cooperation. However, because of the inherent non-controllability of agents across different management domains, this approach has been confronted with the challenge of so-called ldquotrustrdquo crisis that the success and benefit of cooperation cannot be ensured. This crisis has worried the research of autonomic computing and multi-agent systems for a long time. In order to conquer the crisis, this paper proposes a model for Trusted and Autonomic Service Cooperation, called TASC, which can eliminate the dilemma that the requirements of ldquoAutonomyrdquo and ldquoTrustrdquo conflict with each other. This model depends on three technologies to make service cooperation both trusted and autonomic: virtual society assistant management for providing cooperation assistance and maintaining cooperation order, contract templates for quickly creating e-contracts between agents, and norm-conforming policy-driven self-management for making agents conform rationally to the relevant regulations. It is the close coupling of those technologies that supports effectively both the resolution of ldquotrustrdquo crisis and the realization of autonomic service cooperation.