Service discovery through multi-agent consensus

Abstract

Service discovery is one of the key processes for facilitating the automation of service composition. The effectiveness of discovery relies on the appropriateness of descriptions for services and the consensus on the descriptions from participating bodies. However, existing work on service discovery did not address the issues associated with inconsistent understandings on the service descriptions from service providers and consumers. Pre-defined ontology may not be an appropriate solution in this case, due to its static nature and dynamic environment that web services are situated. In this paper, we attempt to address this issue by proposing a multi-agent consensus approach which is based on fuzzy logic and semantic web technologies in order to assist service providers and consumers in reaching consensus on their service advertisement and request with consideration of their expectations and preferences. In addition, a user friendly tool for constructing agent-based web service is introduced for assistance in representing user's preference and expectations as well as managing web services. © 2005 IEEE.