Title: Towards optimal service composition upon QoS in agent cooperation

Authors: Chattrakul Sombattheera; Jun Shen

Addresses: Faculty of Informatics, Mahasarakham University, Khamreang, Kantarawichai, Mahasarakham, 44150, Thailand ' School of Information Systems and Technology (SISAT), Faculty of Informatics, University of Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia

Abstract: It is quite common in tourism industry that a tourist would love to gain the most wonderful experience from visiting multiple places in one trip. This is a service composition problem and is difficult to manage because of several reasons. We address this problem by proposing an agent-based service composition framework to allocate to the tourist an optimal composite service. We take into account a number of factors including: 1) all the places of interest must be visited; 2) the preference on visiting places must be obeyed; 3) the total price is within the budget; 4) the time constraint must be obeyed; 5) the payoffs for service providers are worthwhile and fair. We propose a bottom-up approach to allocate the optimal service composition where intelligent agents are deployed to provide flexibility and efficiency to the system. As a result, the system is more independent and every party is better off.

This research was financially supported by Mahasarakham University, Thailand.

Keywords: service composition; preference; optimal coalition structure; multi-agent systems; MSA; agent-based systems; cooperative games; QoS; quality of service; agent cooperation; tourism industry; tourist services; intelligent agents; multi-site trips; multi-visit trips.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2013.053063

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2013 Vol.8 No.2, pp.119 - 132

Received: 21 Feb 2012
Accepted: 04 Mar 2012
Published online: 27 Dec 2013 *

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