Trust-Based Coalition Formation for Dynamic Service Composition in Social Networks

With the growing number of published Web services, including those being generated in social networks, a lot of service composition approaches have been proposed in the literature. However, they often fail to take into consideration social dimensions between requesters and providers as well as the providers autonomy in deciding with whom to collaborate. To address these challenges, we propose the use of Multi-Agent Systems, as they have the ability to form coalitions of trusted partners. We present a trust-based dynamic coalition formation process for service composition in social networks. In particular, our coalition formation process engaging self-interested agents is incremental, dynamic and overlapping. Agents are equipped with a set of services with their advertised QoS values and cooperate to fulfill the requester query based on a decentralized decision-making process guided by trust. We also presents evaluation results of first experiments to demonstrate the validity of our approach.