Towards a Flexible and Privacy-Preserving Reputation System for Markets of Composed Services

One future goal of service-oriented computing is to realize global markets of composed services. On such markets, service providers offer services that can be flexibly combined with each other. However, most often, market participants are not able to individually estimate the quality of traded services in advance. As a consequence, even potentially profitable transactions between customers and providers might not take place. In the worst case, this can induce a market failure. To overcome this problem, we propose the incorporation of reputation information as an indicator for expected service quality. We address On-The-Fly Computing as a representative environment of markets of composed services. In this environment, customers provide feedback on transactions. We present a conceptual design of a reputation system which collects and processes user feedback, and provides it to participants in the market. Our contribution includes the identification of requirements for such a reputation system from a technical and an economic perspective. Based on these requirements, we propose a flexible solution that facilitates the incorporation of reputation information into markets of composed services while simultaneously preserving privacy of customers who provide feedback. The requirements we formulate in this paper have just been partially met in literature. An integrated approach, however, has not been addressed yet.