Preference-oriented QoS-based service discovery with dynamic trust and reputation management

In the presence of a variety of service providers that offer web services with overlapping or identical functionality, service consumers need a mechanism to distinguish one service from another based on their own subjective quality of service (QoS) preferences. Typical approaches in this field rely on trusted third parties to monitor the behaviour of service providers and endorse their performance based on their delivered services to different users. However, the issue of evaluating the credibility of user reports is one of the essential problems yet to be solved in the e-Business application area. In this paper we propose a two-layered preference-oriented service selection framework that integrates trust and reputation management techniques with an advanced procurement auction model in order to choose the most pertinent service provider that meets a consumer's QoS requirements. We will give a formal description of our approach and validate it with experiments demonstrating that our solution yields high-quality results under various realistic circumstances.