Efficient Community 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 web services with better visibility, efficiency, market share and total payoff. A number of mechanisms and models have been recently proposed to aggregate web services and make them cooperate within their communities. However, forming optimal and stable communities as coalitions to maximize individual and group efficiency and income is yet to be addressed. In this paper, we propose an efficient community formation mechanism using cooperative game-theoretic techniques, particularly Shapley value, core, epsilon-core and convex games. We propose a mechanism for community membership requests and selections of web services under two scenarios: (1) there is only one community and many web services aim to join it; and (2) web services can join different established 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 where a taxation-based solution is being proposed. The theoretical and extensive experimental results show that our algorithms provide web services and community owners, in real-world-like environments, with applicable and near-optimal decision making mechanisms.