Risk Sensitive Value of Changed Information for Selective Querying of Web Services

A key challenge associated with compositions is that they must often function in volatile environments, where the parameters of the component Web services may change during execution. Failure to adapt to such changes may result in sub-optimal compositions. Value of changed information (VOC) offers a principled and recognized approach for selectively querying component services for their revised information. It does so in a rational (risk neutral) way. However, risk preferences often constitute an important part of the organization’s decision analysis cycle and determine its desired business goals. We show how VOC may be generalized to consider preferences such as risk seeking and aversion using a utility based approach. Importantly, considerations of risk preferences lead to different services being used in the compositions and selected for querying for revised information. This is intuitive and provides evidence toward the validity of our approach for modeling risk preferences in VOC.