A survey of QoS-aware web service composition techniques

Web service composition can be briefly described as the process of aggregating services with disparate functionalities into a new composite service in order to meet increasingly complex needs of users. Service composition process has been accurate on dealing with services having disparate functionalities, however, over the years the number of web services in particular that exhibit similar functionalities and varying Quality of Service (QoS) has significantly increased. As such, the problem becomes how to select appropriate web services such that the QoS of the resulting composite service is maximized or, in some cases, minimized. This constitutes an NP-hard problem as it is complicated and difficult to solve. In this paper, a discussion of concepts of web service composition and a holistic review of current service composition techniques proposed in literature is presented. Our review spans several publications in the field that can serve as a road map for future research

A Reliable Web Services Selection Method for Concurrent Requests

Current methods of service selection based on quality of service (QoS) usually focus on a single service request at a time, or let the users in a waiting queue wait for Web services when the same functional Web service has more than one requests, and then choose the Web service with the best QoS for the current request according to its own needs. However, there are multiple service requests for the same functional web service at a time in practice and we cannot choose the best service for users every time because of the service’s load. This paper aims at solving the Web Services selection for concurrent requests and developing a global optimal selection method for multiple similar service requesters to optimize the system resources. It proposes the improved social cognitive (ISCO) algorithm which uses genetic algorithm for observational learning and uses deviating degree to evaluate the solution. Furthermore, to enhance the efficiency of ISCO, the elite strategy is used in ISCO algorithm. We evaluate performance of the ISCO algorithm and the selection method through simulations. The simulation results demonstrate that the ISCO is valid for optimization problems with discrete data and more effective than ACO and GA

A novel composite web service selection based on quality of service

Using the internet, as a dynamic environment thanks to its distributed characteristic, for web service deployment has become a crucial issue in QoS-driven service composition. An accurate adaption should be undertaken to provide a reliable service composition which enables the composited services are being executed appropriately. That is, the critical aspect of service composition is the proper execution of combination of web services while the appropriate service adaption performed with respect to predetermined functional and non-functional characteristics. In this paper, we attempts to deliberate the optimization approaches to devise the appropriate scheme for QoS-based composite web service selection

Framework for Optimal Selection Using Meta‐Heuristic Approach and AHP Algorithm

Many real‐life decisions are focused on selecting the most preferable combination of available options, by satisfying different kinds of preferences and internal or external constraints and requirements. Focusing on the well‐known analytical hierarchical process (AHP) method and its extension CS‐AHP for capturing different kinds of preferences over two‐layered structure (including conditionally defined preferences and preferences about dominant importance), we propose a two‐layered framework for identifying stakeholders’ decision criteria requirements and employ meta‐heuristic algorithms (i.e., genetic algorithms) to optimally make a selection over available options. The proposed formal two‐layered framework, called OptSelectionAHP, provides the means for optimal selection based on specified different kinds of preferences. The framework has simultaneously proven optimality applied in software engineering domain, for optimal configuration of business process families where stakeholders’ preferences are defined over quality characteristics of available services (i.e., QoS attributes). Furthermore, this domain of application is characterized with uncertainty and variability in selection space, which is proven and does not significantly violate the optimality of the proposed framework

Novel optimization schemes for service composition in the cloud using learning automata-based matrix factorization

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyService Oriented Computing (SOC) provides a framework for the realization of loosely couple service oriented applications (SOA). Web services are central to the concept of SOC. They possess several benefits which are useful to SOA e.g. encapsulation, loose coupling and reusability. Using web services, an application can embed its functionalities within the business process of other applications. This is made possible through web service composition. Web services are composed to provide more complex functions for a service consumer in the form of a value added composite service. Currently, research into how web services can be composed to yield QoS (Quality of Service) optimal composite service has gathered significant attention. However, the number and services has risen thereby increasing the number of possible service combinations and also amplifying the impact of network on composite service performance. QoS-based service composition in the cloud addresses two important sub-problems; Prediction of network performance between web service nodes in the cloud, and QoS-based web service composition. We model the former problem as a prediction problem while the later problem is modelled as an NP-Hard optimization problem due to its complex, constrained and multi-objective nature. This thesis contributed to the prediction problem by presenting a novel learning automata-based non-negative matrix factorization algorithm (LANMF) for estimating end-to-end network latency of a composition in the cloud. LANMF encodes each web service node as an automaton which allows v it to estimate its network coordinate in such a way that prediction error is minimized. Experiments indicate that LANMF is more accurate than current approaches. The thesis also contributed to the QoS-based service composition problem by proposing four evolutionary algorithms; a network-aware genetic algorithm (INSGA), a K-mean based genetic algorithm (KNSGA), a multi-population particle swarm optimization algorithm (NMPSO), and a non-dominated sort fruit fly algorithm (NFOA). The algorithms adopt different evolutionary strategies coupled with LANMF method to search for low latency and QoSoptimal solutions. They also employ a unique constraint handling method used to penalize solutions that violate user specified QoS constraints. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the algorithms in a large scale environment. Also the algorithms outperform other evolutionary algorithms in terms of optimality and calability. In addition, the thesis contributed to QoS-based web service composition in a dynamic environment. This is motivated by the ineffectiveness of the four proposed algorithms in a dynamically hanging QoS environment such as a real world scenario. Hence, we propose a new cellular automata-based genetic algorithm (CellGA) to address the issue. Experimental results show the effectiveness of CellGA in solving QoS-based service composition in dynamic QoS environment

GA-Par: Dependable Microservice Orchestration Framework for Geo-Distributed Clouds

Recent advances in composing Cloud applications have been driven by deployments of inter-networking heterogeneous microservices across multiple Cloud datacenters. System dependability has been of the upmost importance and criticality to both service vendors and customers. Security, a measurable attribute, is increasingly regarded as the representative example of dependability. Literally, with the increment of microservice types and dynamicity, applications are exposed to aggravated internal security threats and externally environmental uncertainties. Existing work mainly focuses on the QoS-aware composition of native VM-based Cloud application components, while ignoring uncertainties and security risks among interactive and interdependent container-based microservices. Still, orchestrating a set of microservices across datacenters under those constraints remains computationally intractable. This paper describes a new dependable microservice orchestration framework GA-Par to effectively select and deploy microservices whilst reducing the discrepancy between user security requirements and actual service provision. We adopt a hybrid (both whitebox and blackbox based) approach to measure the satisfaction of security requirement and the environmental impact of network QoS on system dependability. Due to the exponential grow of solution space, we develop a parallel Genetic Algorithm framework based on Spark to accelerate the operations for calculating the optimal or near-optimal solution. Large-scale real world datasets are utilized to validate models and orchestration approach. Experiments show that our solution outperforms the greedy-based security aware method with 42.34 percent improvement. GA-Par is roughly 4× faster than a Hadoop-based genetic algorithm solver and the effectiveness can be constantly guaranteed under different application scales