A new method to identify collaborative partners in social service provider networks

The interactions among service providers are represented as a social network to support service-oriented collaborations across multiple manufacturing enterprises. The combination of service-oriented computing and social network facilitates the connection and collaboration within enterprises. It is essential to identify a group of prosperous collaborative partners in a social network in a prompt and efficient way, especially when the number of alternative service providers is large. However, traditional exhaustive searching approaches are inapplicable in identifying a host enterprise and constitutive members due to the prohibitive computations. In this paper, a new and efficient approach has been proposed to identify service providers optimally based on existing social relations. Three innovations in the proposal are (i) a set of new concepts has been defined to construct a social service provider network; (ii) based on remodeling the social graph, the betweenness centrality algorithm has been enhanced to efficiently find the leader who serves as the host enterprise of a given engineering project; (iii) to improve the efficiency of computation, an innovative algorithm is proposed to identify the collaborative partners by confining the searching space in the set of connector nodes. For the validation purpose, the experimental simulation is conducted and the results have demonstrated that the proposed algorithms outperform several existing algorithms in terms of computation time in dealing with the increasing number of enterprises.