Agent-Based Cloud Computing

Agent-based cloud computing is concerned with the design and development of software agents for bolstering cloud service

discovery, service negotiation, and service composition. The significance of this work is introducing an agent-based paradigm for

constructing software tools and testbeds for cloud resource management. The novel contributions of this work include: 1) developing

Cloudle: an agent-based search engine for cloud service discovery, 2) showing that agent-based negotiation mechanisms can be

effectively adopted for bolstering cloud service negotiation and cloud commerce, and 3) showing that agent-based cooperative problemsolving

techniques can be effectively adopted for automating cloud service composition. Cloudle consists of 1) a service discovery agent

that consults a cloud ontology for determining the similarities between providers’ service specifications and consumers’ service

requirements, and 2) multiple cloud crawlers for building its database of services. Cloudle supports three types of reasoning: similarity

reasoning, compatibility reasoning, and numerical reasoning. To support cloud commerce, this work devised a complex cloud

negotiation mechanism that supports parallel negotiation activities in interrelated markets: a cloud service market between consumer

agents and broker agents, and multiple cloud resource markets between broker agents and provider agents. Empirical results show that

using the complex cloud negotiation mechanism, agents achieved high utilities and high success rates in negotiating for cloud resources.

To automate cloud service composition, agents in this work adopt a focused selection contract net protocol (FSCNP) for dynamically

selecting cloud services and use service capability tables (SCTs) to record the list of cloud agents and their services. Empirical results

show that using FSCNP and SCTs, agents can successfully compose cloud services by autonomously selecting services.