Autonomous bargaining agents: Redefining cloud service negotiation in hybrid ecosystems

With the historic rise in cloud computing, mega-enterprises are now more and more shifting their on-premises IT infrastructures to cloud environments. Even though such migration is being adopted more and more, there still remains a paucity of research focused on autonomous resource negotiation between cloud consumers and providers. The current paper introduces a complete designed framework for multi-party, multi-issue negotiation in cloud resource provision. It offers a sophisticated cloud marketplace in which resources are dynamically purchased and sold. It employs belief–desire–intention (BDI) model-based consumer and provider agents, which negotiate simultaneously on multiple axes. The negotiations employ a hybrid approach that integrates time-aware and resource-aware dynamic deadline methods for computing offers and counteroffers. In addition, the marketplace proposed herein also includes a behavior norm score mechanism and Reputation Index to build agents' mutual trust.