A Conflict Neighbouring Negotiation Algorithm for Resource Services in Dynamic Collaborations

Dynamic collaborations are the means by which a group of autonomous entities collaborate to achieve common objectives through sharing their own resources (e.g. specialised applications, controlled information and data, and storage and networking infrastructures). With the emergence of "cloud computing", it is now possible to share such resources as services. However, sharing such resource services requires that the participants agree to the terms and conditions of their responsibilities, as well as access to information and policies regulating their behaviour within the collaboration. This is done through the use of an eContract that captures the contributed resource-oriented services, as well as their respective service level agreements. One of the unique characteristics of the contract in dynamic collaborations is that each autonomous participant must agree with the services contributed by other participants against a set of its own policies. Within this context, this paper presents an efficient contract negotiation algorithm, called conflict neighbouring algorithm (CNA). We model and verify the algorithm using SPIN model checker, and compare its performance results with other alternative algorithms.