Flexible Procurement of Services with Uncertain Durations using Redundancy
Flexible Procurement of Services with Uncertain Durations using Redundancy
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.
292-298
Stein, Sebastian
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Gerding, Enrico
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Rogers, Alex
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Larson, Kate
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Jennings, Nicholas R.
ab3d94cc-247c-4545-9d1e-65873d6cdb30
2009
Stein, Sebastian
cb2325e7-5e63-475e-8a69-9db2dfbdb00b
Gerding, Enrico
d9e92ee5-1a8c-4467-a689-8363e7743362
Rogers, Alex
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, Larson, Kate and Jennings, Nicholas R.
(2009)
Flexible Procurement of Services with Uncertain Durations using Redundancy.
Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09), Pasadena, California, United States.
11 - 17 Jul 2009.
.
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.
Text
SteinEtAl.pdf
- Accepted Manuscript
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Published date: 2009
Additional Information:
Event Dates: July 11th-17th, 2009
Venue - Dates:
Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09), Pasadena, California, United States, 2009-07-11 - 2009-07-17
Organisations:
Agents, Interactions & Complexity
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 267261
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/267261
PURE UUID: 76e6200a-2284-46eb-82ca-20b31a09651f
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Date deposited: 07 Apr 2009 16:41
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:30
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Contributors
Author:
Sebastian Stein
Author:
Enrico Gerding
Author:
Alex Rogers
Author:
Kate Larson
Author:
Nicholas R. Jennings
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