Related papers: A symmetric protocol to establish service level ag…
We study large-scale distributed cooperative systems that use optimistic replication. We represent a system as a graph of actions (operations) connected by edges that reify semantic constraints between actions. Constraint types include…
Service providers commonly provide only a fixed catalog of services to their clients. Both clients and service providers can benefit from service negotiation, in which a client makes a query for a specific service, and the provider counters…
Negotiation is a very common interaction between automated agents. Many common negotiation protocols work with cardinal utilities, even though ordinal preferences, which only rank the outcomes, are easier to elicit from humans. In this work…
The security features of current digital services are mostly defined and dictated by the service provider (SP). A user can always decline to use a service whose terms do not fulfill the expected criteria, but in many cases, even a simple…
Existing protocols for multilateral negotiation require a full consensus among the negotiating parties. In contrast, we propose a protocol for multilateral negotiation that allows partial consensus, wherein only a subset of the negotiating…
Modern applications often operate on data in multiple administrative domains. In this federated setting, participants may not fully trust each other. These distributed applications use transactions as a core mechanism for ensuring…
We consider a seller who offers services to a buyer with multi-unit demand. Prior to the realization of demand, the buyer receives a noisy signal of their future demand, and the seller can design contracts based on the reported value of…
There exists a plethora of consensus protocols in literature. The reason is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, since every protocol is unique and its performance is directly tied to the deployment settings and workload…
In service exchange platforms, anonymous users exchange services with each other: clients request services and are matched to servers who provide services. Because providing good-quality services requires effort, in any single interaction a…
This paper addresses a problem found within the construction of Service Oriented Architecture: the adaptation of service protocols with respect to functional redundancy and heterogeneity of global communication patterns. We utilise the…
With the ever increasing importance of web services and the Cloud as a reliable commodity to provide business value as well as consolidate IT infrastructure, electronic contracts have become very important. WS-Agreement has itself…
We study the problem of agent-based negotiation in combinatorial domains. It is difficult to reach optimal agreements in bilateral or multi-lateral negotiations when the agents' preferences for the possible alternatives are not common…
We consider a sequential blocked matching (SBM) model where strategic agents repeatedly report ordinal preferences over a set of services to a central planner. The planner's goal is to elicit agents' true preferences and design a policy…
We consider government service allocation -- how the government allocates resources (e.g., maintenance of public infrastructure) over time. It is important to make these decisions efficiently and equitably -- though these desiderata may…
Population protocols are a model of distributed computation intended for the study of networks of independent computing agents with dynamic communication structure. Each agent has a finite number of states, and communication opportunities…
Automatic software remodularisation is typically cast as a single-objective optimization problem. While recent metaheuristics have improved search efficiency, real-world architecture recovery must reconcile the conflicting attributes of…
Many-to-many matching with contracts is studied in the framework of revealed preferences. All preferences are described by choice functions that satisfy natural conditions. Under a no-externality assumption individual preferences can be…
Contract-based design is a method to facilitate modular system design. While there has been substantial progress on the theory of contracts, there has been less progress on scalable algorithms for the algebraic operations in this theory. In…
This paper presents an analytical framework to model fault-tolerance in unstructured peer-to-peer overlays, represented as complex networks. We define a distributed protocol peers execute for managing the overlay and reacting to node…
Service supply chain management is to prepare spare parts for failed products under warranty. Their goal is to reach agreed service level at the minimum cost. We convert this business problem into a preference based multi-objective…