Autonomous integration and provision of heterogeneous information services in distributed information systems

Abstract

The need for flexibility, adaptability and timeliness of information service systems has become increasingly important since the advent of electronic commerce. This fosters an urgent need for the design of a high-assurance information service system to meet both providers' and users' heterogeneous requirements. In order to cope with rapidly evolving situations of service provision and utilization, an autonomous information service system has been proposed, called faded information field (FIF). FIF is a distributed information service system architecture, sustained by push/pull mobile agents, through recursive demand-oriented provision of the most popular information closer to the users to make a tradeoff between the cost of service allocation and access. In this system, users' requests are autonomously driven by pull mobile agents in charge of finding the relevant service. In the case of a mono-service request, the system is designed to reduce the time needed for users to access the information and to preserve the consistency of the replicas. However, when the user requests joint selection of multi-services, synchronization of atomic actions and timeliness have to be assured by the system. In this paper, the relationship that exists among the contents, properties and access ratios of information services is clarified. Based on these factors, the ratio of correlation is defined and the autonomous integration and provision of information services for heterogeneous FIFs to provide one-stop service for users' multi-service requirements are proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed technology is shown through evaluation and the results show that the integrated services can reduce the total users access time and increase service consumption compared with separate systems.