Analyzing coopetition strategies of services within communities

Recently, a number of frameworks have been proposed to aggregate web services within communities for the purpose of enhancing their capabilities with respect to providing the required services. Most of the proposed frameworks suggest that web services within these communities are competing but also exhibit cooperative behavior, so web services are said to be coopetitive. However, deciding which strategy to adopt, which means competing or cooperating is still an open question. The purpose of this paper is to answer this question by discussing a mechanism web services can use to effectively choose interacting strategies which bring maximum utility. In this direction, we investigate web services' characteristics and their expected utilities over different strategies. We enable web services that are hosted in communities with reasoning capabilities to enhance their quality of strategic interacting mechanisms as decision making procedures. The ultimate objective is to analyze factors that helps web services decide about different interacting strategies. Moreover, we develop a simulated environment where we analyze different scenarios and verify the obtained theoretical results using parameters from a real web services dataset.