Social techniques for effective interactions in open cooperative systems

Abstract

Distributed systems are becoming increasingly popular, both in academic and commercial communities, because of the functionality they offer for sharing resources among participants of these communities. As individual systems with different purposes and functionalities are developed, and as data of many different kinds are generated, the value to be gained from sharing services with others rather than just personal use, increases dramatically. This, however, is only achievable if participants of open systems cooperate with each other, to ensure the longevity of the system and the richness of available services, and to make decisions about the services they use to ensure that they are of sufficient levels of quality. Moreover, the properties of distributed systems such as openness, dynamism, heterogeneity and resource-bounded providers bring a number of challenges to designing computational entities that cooperate effectively and efficiently. In particular, computational entities must deal with the diversity of available services, the possible resource limitations for service provision, and with finding providers willing to cooperate even in the absence of economic gains. This requires a means not only to provide non-monetary incentives for service providers, but also to account for the level of quality of cooperations, in terms of the quality of provided and received services. In support of this, entities must be capable of selecting among alternative interaction partners, since each will offer distinct properties, which may change due to the dynamism of the environment. With this in mind, our goal is to develop mechanisms to allow effective cooperation between agents operating in systems that are open, dynamic, heterogeneous, and cooperative. Such mechanisms are needed in the context of cooperative applications with services that are free of charge, such as those in bioinformatics. To achieve this, we propose a framework for non-monetary cooperative interactions, which provides non-monetary incentives for service provision and a means to analyse cooperations; an evaluation method, for evaluating dynamic services; a provider selection mechanism, for decision-making over service requests; and a requester selection mechanism, for decision-making over service provision.

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