Detecting service provider alliances on the choreography enactment pricing game

Abstract: We present the choreography enactment pricing game, a cooperative game-theoretic model for the study of scheduling of jobs using competitor service providers. A choreography (a peer-to-peer service composition model) needs a set of services to fulfill its jobs requirements. Users must choose, for each requirement, which service providers will be used to enact the choreography at lowest cost. Due to the lack of centralization, vendors can form alliances to control the market. We show a novel algorithm capable of detecting alliances among service providers, based on our study of the bargaining set of this game.