This thesis proposes a combinatorial auction-based marketplace mechanism for cloudcomputing services, which allows users to reserve arbitrary combination of services atrequested timeslots, prices and quality of service. The proposed mechanism helps enterpriseusers build workflow applications in a cloud computing environment, specifically on theplatform-as-a-service, where the users need to compose multiple types of services at differenttimeslots.The proposed marketplace mechanism consists of a forward market for an advancereservation and a spot market for an immediate allocation of services. Each market employsmixed integer programming to enforce a Pareto optimum allocation with maximized socialeconomic welfare, as well as double-sided auction design to encourage both users andproviders to compete for buying and selling the services.A marketplace simulator, named W-Mart, is specially developed for this thesis. Itimplements the proposed mechanism on Java platform being powered by CPLEX, thestate-of-the-art MIP solver. W-Mart is designed after the multi-agent virtual market systemU-Mart, and is also capable to deal with human agents and machine agents at the same time.Three experiments are carried out by means of multi-agent simulations. First, theaccuracy of the combinatorial allocation scheme is validated. The result demonstrates that itworks properly. Second, the overhead of the proposed market mechanism including MIPsolver is assessed. The result shows that the overhead is acceptable to deal with an expectednumber of participants within the proposed trading schedule. Third, the performances of fourtypes of market mechanisms are extensively evaluated. The results clarify that (1) theproposed forward/combinatorial mechanism outperforms other non-combinatorial and/ornon-reservation (spot) mechanisms in both user-centric rationality and global efficiency, (2)running both a forward market and a spot market improves resource utilization withoutdisturbing advance reservations, and (3) the users\u27 preference between the forward marketand the spot market affects the performance of whole marketplace significantly in tightdemand/supply conditions
