Towards Fair Reputation Propagation from a Composite Service to Its Component Services

Reputation mechanism is critical for a distributed service environment. A customer can select the optimal services to compose a value-added composite service based on services´ reputation values. After executing (either successfully or unsuccessfully) a composite service, a customer gives a feedback to the composite service. Then the composite service needs to propagate perception of customer´s feedback to each of the component services. However, how to fairly distribute the customer´s perception to the component services is a challenging issue, as each of its component services may perform differently in contributing to the success or failure. In this paper, we present a QoS-aware approach for reputation propagation to address this problem. The proposed techniques enable a composite service to propagate customer´s perception to its component services based on their actual performance in the latest execution and their services reputation trends over a period of time. Experiment results show that our methodologies can effectively and fairly distribute customer´s perception from a composite service to its component services.