Promoting cooperation in service-oriented MAS through social plasticity and incentives

In distributed environments where entities only have a partial view of the system, cooperation plays a key issue. In the case of decentralized service discovery in open Service-Oriented Multi-Agent Systems, agents only know about the services they provide and their direct neighbors. Therefore, they need the cooperation of their neighbors in order to locate the required services. However, cooperation is not always present in open and distributed systems. Non-cooperative 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 paper, we propose the combination of local structural changes and incentives in order to promote cooperation in the service discovery process. The results show that, even in scenarios where the predominant behavior is not collaborative the cooperation emerges.