A hayekian self-organization approach to service allocation in computing systems

Future ‘on-demand’ computing systems, often depicted as potentially large scale and complex Service-Oriented Architectures, will need innovative management approaches for controlling and matching services demand and supply. Centralized optimization approaches reach their bounds with increasing network size and number of nodes. The search for decentralized approaches has led to build on self-organization concepts like Autonomic Computing, which draw their inspiration from Biology. This article shows how an alternative self-organization concept from Economics, the Catallaxy concept of F.A. von Hayek, can be realized for allocating service supply and demand in a distributed ‘on-demand’ web services network. Its implementation using a network simulator allows evaluating the approach against a centralized resource broker, by dynamically varying connection reliability and node density in the network. Exhibiting Autonomic Computing properties, the Catallaxy realization outperforms a centralized broker in highly dynamic environments.