Helpful Behavior Based on Trust for Web Services

As non-functional properties of composite software services involve a good deal of uncertainty, we consider them as shared goals for an agent team. An architect is focused on choosing each service and its provider, while the consultant will suggest, when help is possible, an alternative so that the likelihood of success is maximized. We employ a structure called”Belief Recipe Tree” for supporting this kind of decisions and build the necessary beliefs starting from a set of prior experiences the consultant has had with different provider and/or abstract plans. This approach is shown to provide a higher flexibility due to the fact that beliefs are revised after each experience.