TY - JOUR
T1 - VCG Auction-Based Dynamic Pricing for Multigranularity Service Composition
AU - Wu, Quanwang
AU - Zhou, Meng Chu
AU - Zhu, Qingsheng
AU - Xia, Yunni
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received January 29, 2017; revised March 26, 2017; accepted April 12, 2017. Date of publication May 24, 2017; date of current version April 5, 2018. This paper was recommended for publication by Associate Editor Q. Zhao and Editor S. Reveliotis upon evaluation of the reviewers’ comments. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61103036, by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China under Grant 106112016CDJXY180004, and in part by the Deanship of Scientific Research, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, under Grant P-024-135-437. (Corresponding authors: Quanwang Wu; Yunni Xia.) Q. Wu, Q. Zhu, and Y. Xia are with the Software Theory and Technology Chongqing Key Laboratory, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400030, China (e-mail: wqw@cqu.edu.cn; qszhu@cqu.edu.cn; xiayunni@hotmail.com).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 IEEE.
PY - 2018/4
Y1 - 2018/4
N2 - When a single service on its own cannot fulfill a sophisticated application, a composition of services is required. Existing methods mostly use a fixed-price scheme for service pricing and determine service allocation for composition based on a first-price auction. However, in a dynamic service market, it is difficult for service providers to determine a fixed price that is profitable while attractive to customers. Meanwhile, this mechanism cannot ensure that the providers who require the least cost to provide services would win the auction, because the pricing strategy of service providers is unpredictable. To address such issues, in this paper, we propose Vickrey-Clarke-Groves auction-based dynamic pricing for a generalized service composition. We consider fine-grained services as candidates for composition as well as coarse-grained ones. In our approach, service providers bid for services of different granularities in the composite service and based on received bids, a user decides a composition that minimizes the social cost while meeting quality constraints. Experimental results at last verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Note to Practitioners - Motivated by the popular auction-based dynamic pricing in the modern Internet business, this paper proposes a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves auction-based approach for multigranularity service composition in order to overcome the shortcomings of existing approaches, e.g., unpredictability in service pricing, and lack of economic efficiency. The proposed approach instantiates a composite service in an economically efficient way and it offers service providers with the incentives to honestly declare the true costs of their concrete services in the bids. In the experiments, compared with fine-grained service composition, the proposed approach reduces the social cost and user payment of service composition by 6.8% and 11.2% on average, respectively, and it also shows superiority over the first-price auction-based approach.
AB - When a single service on its own cannot fulfill a sophisticated application, a composition of services is required. Existing methods mostly use a fixed-price scheme for service pricing and determine service allocation for composition based on a first-price auction. However, in a dynamic service market, it is difficult for service providers to determine a fixed price that is profitable while attractive to customers. Meanwhile, this mechanism cannot ensure that the providers who require the least cost to provide services would win the auction, because the pricing strategy of service providers is unpredictable. To address such issues, in this paper, we propose Vickrey-Clarke-Groves auction-based dynamic pricing for a generalized service composition. We consider fine-grained services as candidates for composition as well as coarse-grained ones. In our approach, service providers bid for services of different granularities in the composite service and based on received bids, a user decides a composition that minimizes the social cost while meeting quality constraints. Experimental results at last verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Note to Practitioners - Motivated by the popular auction-based dynamic pricing in the modern Internet business, this paper proposes a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves auction-based approach for multigranularity service composition in order to overcome the shortcomings of existing approaches, e.g., unpredictability in service pricing, and lack of economic efficiency. The proposed approach instantiates a composite service in an economically efficient way and it offers service providers with the incentives to honestly declare the true costs of their concrete services in the bids. In the experiments, compared with fine-grained service composition, the proposed approach reduces the social cost and user payment of service composition by 6.8% and 11.2% on average, respectively, and it also shows superiority over the first-price auction-based approach.
KW - Dynamic pricing
KW - Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction
KW - optimization
KW - quality-of-service (QoS)
KW - service composition
KW - truthfulness
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85019947373&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85019947373&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TASE.2017.2695123
DO - 10.1109/TASE.2017.2695123
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85019947373
SN - 1545-5955
VL - 15
SP - 796
EP - 805
JO - IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering
JF - IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering
IS - 2
ER -