Coopetition mechanisms for service-oriented distributed systems

The constant Internet growth and improvements in distributed technology have prompted the emergence of large-scale heterogeneous systems. Service-Oriented Computing enables the design and development of heterogeneous distributed systems through composition of individual services. However, majority of existing service composition systems have centralized execution control and management servers. We propose a new model for building distributed systems, which is based on coopetition principle. The coopetition-based distributed system consists of a set of services that cooperate and compete in order to achieve the overall goal. Thus, the control and management of execution workflow are decentralized and divided between distributed services. In this paper, we describe a set of synchronization, communication, and collaboration mechanisms that provide the support for development of coopetition-based distributed systems. The coopetition mechanisms are implemented as platform-independent Web Services conforming to the WS-* standard set.