Emergence of cooperation through structural changes and incentives in service-oriented MAS

In distributed environments where entities only have a partial view of the system collaboration plays a key issue. In the case of decentralized service discovery in Service-Oriented MAS (SOMAS), agents only know about the services they provide and their direct neighbors. Therefore, they need the collaboration of their neighbors in order to locate the required services. However, collaboration is not always present in open and distributed systems. Non-collaborating agents pursuing their own goals could reject forwarding queries from other agents; therefore, the efficiency of the decentralized service discovery could be seriously damaged. In this paper we propose the combination of structural changes and incentives based on utility in order to promote the collaboration in the service discovery process.