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Flexible Procurement of Services with Uncertain Durations

Flexible Procurement of Services with Uncertain Durations
Flexible Procurement of Services with Uncertain Durations
Emerging service-oriented technologies allow software agents to automatically procure distributed services to complete complex tasks. However, in many application scenarios, service providers demand financial remuneration, execution times are uncertain and consumers have deadlines for their tasks. In this paper, we address these issues by developing a novel approach that dynamically procures multiple, redundant services over time, in order to ensure success by the deadline. Specifically, we first present an algorithm for finding optimal procurement solutions, as well as a heuristic algorithm that achieves over 99% of the optimal and is capable of handling thousands of providers. Using experiments, we show that these algorithms achieve an improvement of up to 130% over current strategies that procure only single services. Finally, we consider settings where service costs are not known to the consumer, and introduce several mechanisms that incentivise providers to reveal their costs truthfully and that still achieve up to 95% efficiency.
Stein, Sebastian
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Gerding, Enrico
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Rogers, Alex C.
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Larson, Kate
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Jennings, Nicholas R.
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Stein, Sebastian
cb2325e7-5e63-475e-8a69-9db2dfbdb00b
Gerding, Enrico
d9e92ee5-1a8c-4467-a689-8363e7743362
Rogers, Alex C.
f9130bc6-da32-474e-9fab-6c6cb8077fdc
Larson, Kate
e180cd56-8fad-4e90-8e0c-00bd832ab254
Jennings, Nicholas R.
ab3d94cc-247c-4545-9d1e-65873d6cdb30

Stein, Sebastian, Gerding, Enrico, Rogers, Alex C., Larson, Kate and Jennings, Nicholas R. (2009) Flexible Procurement of Services with Uncertain Durations. Second International Workshop on Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems (OptMas), Budapest, Hungary.

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Emerging service-oriented technologies allow software agents to automatically procure distributed services to complete complex tasks. However, in many application scenarios, service providers demand financial remuneration, execution times are uncertain and consumers have deadlines for their tasks. In this paper, we address these issues by developing a novel approach that dynamically procures multiple, redundant services over time, in order to ensure success by the deadline. Specifically, we first present an algorithm for finding optimal procurement solutions, as well as a heuristic algorithm that achieves over 99% of the optimal and is capable of handling thousands of providers. Using experiments, we show that these algorithms achieve an improvement of up to 130% over current strategies that procure only single services. Finally, we consider settings where service costs are not known to the consumer, and introduce several mechanisms that incentivise providers to reveal their costs truthfully and that still achieve up to 95% efficiency.

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More information

Published date: May 2009
Additional Information: Event Dates: 11 May 2009
Venue - Dates: Second International Workshop on Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems (OptMas), Budapest, Hungary, 2009-05-11
Organisations: Agents, Interactions & Complexity

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 267250
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/267250
PURE UUID: 10c0bf9c-1344-4e99-b669-9d01da2f2a3c
ORCID for Sebastian Stein: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-2858-8857
ORCID for Enrico Gerding: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0001-7200-552X

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 03 Apr 2009 10:25
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:30

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Contributors

Author: Sebastian Stein ORCID iD
Author: Enrico Gerding ORCID iD
Author: Alex C. Rogers
Author: Kate Larson
Author: Nicholas R. Jennings

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