Publications in Negotiation

Articles in Refereed Journals:

1. Nicholas R. Jennings, Peyman Faratin, A. R. Lomuscio, Simon Parsons, Michael Wooldridge, Carles Sierra. Automated Negotiation: Prospects Methods and Challenges. Group Decision and Negotiation, To Appear, 2001.

Articles in Refereed Conferences:

1. Elisabetta Di Nitto, Massimiliano Di Penta, Alessio Gambi, Gianluca Ripa, Maria Luisa Villani. Negotiation of Service Level Agreements: An Architecture and a Search-Based Approach. ICSOC, pages 295-306, 2007.
   Abstract: Software systems built by composing existing services are more and more capturing the interest of researchers and practitioners. The envisaged long term scenario is that services, offered by some competing providers, are chosen by some consumers and used for their own purpose, possibly, in conjunction with other services. In the case the consumer is not anymore satisfied by the performance of some service, he can try to replace it with some other service. This implies the creation of a global market of services and poses new requirements concerning validation of exploited services, security of transactions engaged with services, trustworthiness, creation and negotiation of Service Level Agreements with these services. In this paper we focus on the last aspect and present our approach for negotiation of Service Level Agreements. Our architecture supports the actuation of various negotiation processes and offers a search-based algorithm to assist the negotiating parts in the achievement of an agreement.

2. Mohan Baruwal Chhetri, Jian Lin, SukKeong Goh, Jian Ying Zhang, Ryszard Kowalczyk, Jun Yan. A Coordinated Architecture for the Agent-based Service Level Agreement Negotiation ofWeb Service Composition. ASWEC, pages 90-99, 2006.
   Abstract: Recent progress in the field of Web services has made it possible to integrate inter-organizational and heterogeneous services on the Web at runtime. If a user request cannot be satisfied by a single Web service, it is (or should be) possible to combine existing services in order to fulfill the request. However, there are several challenging issues that need to be addressed before this can be realized in the true sense. One of them is the ability to ensure end-to-end QoS of a Web service composition. There is a need for a SLA negotiation system which can ensure the autonomous QoS negotiation of Web service compositions irrespective of the application domain. In this paper we propose agent-based coordinated-negotiation architecture to ensure collective functionality, end-to-end QoS and the stateful coordination of complex services. We describe a prototype implementation to demonstrate how this architecture can be used in different application domains. We have also demonstrated how the negotiation system on the service provider's side can be implemented both as an agent based negotiation system and as a Web service based negotiation system.

3. Andreas Wombacher, Peter Fankhauser, Erich J. Neuhold. Transforming BPEL into Annotated Deterministic Finite State Automata for Service Discovery. ICWS, pages 316-323, 2004.
   Abstract: Web services advocate loosely coupled systems, although current loosely coupled applications are limited to stateless services. The reason for this limitation is the lack of a method supporting matchmaking of state dependent services exemplarily specified in BPEL. In particular, the sender's requirement that the receiver must support all possible messages sent at a certain state are not captured by models currently used for service discovery. Annotated deterministic finite state automata provide this expressiveness. In this paper the transformation of a local process specification given in BPEL to annotated deterministic finite state automata is presented.

4. Octavio Martín-Díaz, Antonio Ruiz Cortés, Amador Durán, David Benavides, Miguel Toro. Automating the Procurement of Web Services. ICSOC, pages 91-103, 2003.
   Abstract: As government agencies and business become more dependent on web services, software solutions to automate their procurement gain importance. Current approaches for automating the procurement of web services suffer from an important drawback: neither uncertainty measures nor non-linear, and complex relations among parameters can be used by providers to specify quality-of-service in offers. In this paper, we look deeply into the roots of this drawback and present a proposal which overcomes it. The key point to achieve this improvement has been using the constraint programming as a formal basis, since it endows the model with a very powerful expressiveness. A XML-based implementation is presented along with some experimental results and comparisons with other approaches.