Self-Organization Based Service Discovery Approach Considering Intermediary Utility

In a distributed service-oriented multiagent system, agents have to cooperate with each other to complete decentralized service discovery tasks. Since system structure can influence the efficiency of service discovery, structural self-organization mechanism should be used to facilitate the decentralized service discovery in the system. During decentralized service discovery processes, different agents will present different intermediary utilities, and the intermediary utilities of agents imply the distribution information of system services in a certain extent. Therefore, the intermediary utility can be used to improve the efficiency of structural self-organization and service search. However, the existing self-organization based service discovery approaches ignore this issue. In this paper, we propose a novel self-organization based service discovery approach considering intermediary utility. The approach addresses the intermediary utilities of agents in both the structural self-organization mechanism and service search strategy. Besides, this paper considers maintaining the global connectivity of system structure during concurrent self-organization processes to guarantee the global accessibility of services. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed approach is the first self-organization based service discovery approach that can provably preserve the global connectivity of system structure. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the previous approaches and considerably improves the success rate and search efficiency of service discovery.