Incorporating Reputation Information into Decision-Making Processes in Markets of Composed Services

One goal of service-oriented computing is to realize future markets of composed services. In such markets, service providers offer services that can be flexibly combined with each other. However, although crucial for decision-making, market participants are usually not able to individually estimate the quality of traded services in advance. To overcome this problem, we present a conceptual design for a reputation system that collects and processes user feedback on transactions, and provides this information as a signal for quality to participants in the market. Based on our proposed concept, we describe the incorporation of reputation information into distinct decision-making processes that are crucial in such service markets. In this context, we present a fuzzy service matching approach that takes reputation information into account. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive service composition approach, and investigate the impact of exchanging immediate user feedback by reputation information. Last but not least, we describe the importance of reputation information for economic decisions of different market participants. The overall output of this paper is a comprehensive view on managing and exploiting reputation information in markets of composed services using the example of On-The-Fly Computing.