Trustworthy service selection and composition

Abstract

We consider Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) environments. Such environments are populated with services that stand proxy for a variety of information resources. A fundamental challenge in SOC is to select and compose services, to support specified user needs directly or by providing additional services. Existing approaches for service selection either fail to capture the dynamic relationships between services or assume that the environment is fully observable. In practical situations, however, consumers are often not aware of how the services are implemented. We propose two distributed trust-aware service selection approaches: one based on Bayesian networks and the other on a beta-mixture model. We experimentally validate our approach through a simulation study. Our results show that both approaches accurately punish and reward services in terms of the qualities they offer, and further that the approaches are effective despite incomplete observations regarding the services under consideration. © 2011 ACM.