STRATEGIES FOR COOPERATION EMERGENCE IN DISTRIBUTED SERVICE DISCOVERY

In distributed environments where entities only have a partial view of the system, cooperation is a key issue. In the case of decentralized service discovery in open agent societies, agents only know about the services they provide and who their direct neighbors are. Therefore, they need the cooperation of their neighbors in order to locate the required services. However, cooperation is not always present in open systems. Noncooperative agents pursuing their own goals could refuse to forward queries from other agents to avoid the cost of this action; therefore, the efficiency of the decentralized service discovery could be seriously damaged. In this article, we propose the combination of incentives and local structural changes in order to promote cooperation in the service discovery process. The results show that, even in scenarios where the predominant behavior is not collaborative, cooperation emerges.