Sebastian Stein defends his PhD Thesis

28/04/2008

Flexible Service Provisioning in Multi-Agent Systems

PhD Abstract

Service-oriented computing is an increasingly popular approach for providing applications, computational resources and business services over highly distributed and open systems (such as the Web, computational Grids and peer-to-peer systems). In this approach, service providers advertise their offerings by means of standardised computer-readable descriptions, which can then be used by software applications to discover and consume appropriate services without human intervention. However, despite active research in service infrastructures, and in service discovery and composition mechanisms, little work has recognised that services are offered by inherently autonomous and self-interested entities. This autonomy implies that providers may choose not to honour every service request, demand remuneration for their efforts, and in general, exhibit uncertain behaviour. This uncertainty is especially problematic for the service consumers when services are part of complex workflows, as is common in many application domains, such as bioinformatics, large-scale data analysis and processing and commercial supply-chain management...

The full abstract can be found in the thesis.

Publications generated as part of his PhD

2009

Stein, S., Payne, T. R. and Jennings, N. R. (2009) Flexible Provisioning of Web Service Workflows. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 9 (1). 2:1-2:45.

Stein, S., Payne, T. R. and Jennings, N. R. (2009) Flexible Selection of Heterogeneous and Unreliable Services in Large-Scale Grids. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical & Engineering Sciences, 367 (1897). pp. 2483-2494.

2008

Stein, S. (2008) Flexible Service Provisioning in Multi-Agent Systems. PhD thesis, University of Southampton.

Stein, S., Payne, T. R. and Jennings, N. R. (2008) Flexible QoS-Based Service Selection and Provisioning in Large-Scale Grids. In: UK e-Science 2008 All Hands Meeting (AHM), HPC Grids of Continental Scope, 8-11 September, Edinburgh.

Stein, S., Jennings, N. R. and Payne, T. (2008) Flexible Service Provisioning with Advance Agreements. In: Seventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS-08), 12-16 May 2008, Estoril, Portugal.

2007

Stein, S., Jennings, N. R. and Payne, T. R. (2007) Provisioning Heterogeneous and Unreliable Providers for Service Workflows. In: 6th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (AAMAS-07), May 14-18 2007, Hawaii, USA.

Stein, S., Payne, T. R. and Jennings, N. R. (2007) An Effective Strategy for the Flexible Provisioning of Service Workflows. In: The Workshop on Service-Oriented Computing: Agents, Semantics, and Engineering (SOCASE 2007), May 14, 2007, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.

Stein, S., Jennings, N. R. and Payne, T. R. (2007) Provisioning Heterogeneous and Unreliable Providers for Service Workflows. In: Twenty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 22–26 July 2007, Vancouver, Canada.

Stein, S., Payne, T. R. and Jennings, N. R. (2007) Sensitivity Analysis of Flexible Provisioning. Technical Report ECSTR-IAM07-001, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton.

2006

Stein, S., Payne, T. R. and Jennings, N. R. (2006) Flexible Provisioning of Semantic Web Service Workflows using a QoS Ontology. In: International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), 5th-9th November, 2006, Athens, GA.

Stein, S., Jennings, N. R. and Payne, T. R. (2006) Flexible Provisioning of Service Workflows. In: 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-06), Aug 28th - Sept 1st, Riva del Garda, Italy.

Stein, S., Jennings, N. R. and Payne, T. R. (2006) Flexible Provisioning of Service Workflows (Extended Abstract). In: Fourth European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems, 14-15th December, Lisbon, Portugal.