Efficient Coalition Formation for Web Services

Web services are loosely-coupled business applications willing to cooperate in distributed settings within different groups called communities. Communities aim to provide better visibility, efficiency, market share and total payoff. There are a number of proposed mechanisms and models on aggregating web services and making them cooperate within their communities. However, forming optimal and stable communities as coalitions to maximize individual and group efficiency and income has not been addressed yet. In this paper, we propose an efficient coalition formation mechanism using cooperative game-theoretic techniques. We propose a mechanism for community membership requests and selections of web services in the scenarios where established communities already exist. Moreover, we analyze the scenarios where communities are not established yet and web services can form multiple communities. The ultimate objective is to develop a mechanism for web services to form stable groups allowing them to maximize their efficiency and generate near-optimal (welfare-maximizing) communities. The theoretical and simulation results show that our algorithms provide web services and community owners with applicable and near-optimal decision making mechanisms.