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Top1. Introduction
In today’s competitive market, not only do manufactures seek to improve the internal situation, but also they select and evaluate the best providers. This selection is a measure that contributes to improve economic and social performances along a SC (Supply Chain) (AliYawar & Seuring, 2018). In a SC, suppliers can provide many WSs (Web Services) with different functional characteristics. However, it’s not much easy to satisfy ever-increasing complicated customer’s demands that require supply chain to work with efficiently and less-costly in a more complex consuming information network (Zhang et al., 2019).
With the rapid development of cloud computing, services are becoming one of the research hotspots. Lindner et al. (2010) define a cloud SC as “two or more parts linked by the provision of cloud services, related information and funds”. A cloud SC represents a network of interconnected organizations that are involved in the provision of products and services required by customers. Software vendors have realized the potential to apply cloud-based solutions in their SC strategies and activities in order to increase proficiency and profitability. However, using SC resources with a cloud-based solution and taking full advantages of manufacturing technology, information technology, network technology and computer become an important content of current SC management. Therefore, moving to a cloud-based solution for SC makes services management problems more and more crucial. Moreover, many organizations and corporations on SC publish many different UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration) nodes (Clement et al., 2004) in a cloud. The issue is the organization of these nodes and the collaboration between them. This issue still has several weaknesses, such as the classification mechanism and communications among the UDDI nodes. These weaknesses prevent users from real-time discovering efficiently the best WS provider. Many methods and approaches such as those presented by Lalit et al. (2019); Fariss et al. (2018); Ravindran et al. (2016) and Bajec et al. (2017) have involved the cloud computing and the QoS (Quality of Service) management in the services selection. But all of them cannot meet the “Everything as a Service” because it does not consider the key features of cloud. The field still requires effective design paradigms and practical system implementations for facilitating cloud service’s registry and selection.
At the same time, software agents are widely used as an enabling technology to build cooperative applications (Brahimi et al., 2009). It is the most suitable technology to deal with decision making strategies in such environments, because they permit an easy combination of various artificial intelligence techniques. Therefore, we envisage the use of agents as autonomous entities that can invoke WSs. Furthermore, one of the main benefits of using the agent technology for SC management is the dynamic formation of SCs using negotiations or contracts by agents.