A k-median facility location agent for low-cost service selection in digital community network

With the increasing number of web services, it becomes a difficult task for an ordinary user to select an appropriate service. Hence, it is conventional that users in a digital community network take part in a collaborative mechanism for the purpose of service selection. The participation usually brings unnecessary burdens for users, such as giving opinions, storing service information. Extra communication overhead hinders the performance of the network. Thus, the community administrators are facing a problem of how to obtain an overall service selection result for the whole community readily and effectively. To address this problem, we present a k-median facility location agent model. The model analyzes the procedure of service selection through five entities and six types of messages. Two algorithms are elaborated in pursuit of a global optimization concerning connection costs between users and facilities where services are deployed. To evaluate our model, we conduct extensive simulations and present a detailed analysis of the simulation results.