An Architecture for Simulating Internet-of-Services Economies

Abstract

The Internet-of-Services describes a general paradigm of distributed computing with transparent service selection in a shared infrastructure. One particular question to be solved is how to match service supply and demand dynamically, while information is asymmetrically distributed between buyers and sellers (represented by agents). As buyers can not investigate the computation service before use, sellers can behave strategically. Including trust-enhancing market concepts or reputation mechanisms can help to lower this information gap. Researching into this effect requires the setup of simulation environments, that allow to change policies (e.g. market structure or reputation parameters). In this paper, we present an architecture of a simulation environment integrating electronic institutions from multi-agent research to simulate Internet-of-Services systems.