A social network approach in semantic web services selection using follow the leader behavior

Automatic discovery of web services is a crucial task for e-Business communities. Locating and selecting "the best" web service from a vast number of similar services that matches the user's requirements and preferences is a cognitive challenge and requires the use of an intelligent decision making framework. This paper develops a flexible ontological architecture and framework for Semantic Web Service Selection that exploits Goldbaum's innovative "Follow the Leader" model originally designed as an analytic tool for studying social network behavior and evolution. The framework proposes two new ontologies integrated in a recommender system, which guides a user to select the best service that matches their requirements and preferences. We test and evaluate several behaviors of market leader scenarios using a simulation agent. ©2009 IEEE

Challenges to describe QoS requirements for web services quality prediction to support web services interoperability in electronic commerce

Quality of service (QoS) is significant and necessary for web service applications quality assurance. Furthermore, web services quality has contributed to the successful implementation of Electronic Commerce (EC) applications. However, QoS is still the big issue for web services research and remains one of the main research questions that need to be explored. We believe that QoS should not only be measured but should also be predicted during the development and implementation stages. However, there are challenges and constraints to determine and choose QoS requirements for high quality web services. Therefore, this paper highlights the challenges for the QoS requirements prediction as they are not easy to identify. Moreover, there are many different perspectives and purposes of web services, and various prediction techniques to describe QoS requirements. Additionally, the paper introduces a metamodel as a concept of what makes a good web service

Cost Dependent QoS-based Discovery of Web Services

The role of the web services for development of distributed applications steadily increases over time. However, the rising number of available web services with the same functionality embarrasses clients during selection of such a one that fits best their requirements. To solve this problem, web service selection process needs to concern not only functional but also nonfunctional (QoS) properties of web services. The clients need to know the quality of the offered web services as well as what will be the price that they should pay for that quality. This paper contributes to this challenge by presenting an algorithm that allows clients to select the web service with an optimal correlation between quality and price.This paper has been supported by the Project Creative Development Support of Doctoral Students, Post-Doctoral and Young Researches in the Field of Computer Science (No. BG 051PO001-3.3.04/13) of the HR Development OP of the European Social Fund 2007-2013

Process optimization of service-oriented automation devices based on Petri nets

Best paper award.This paper introduces a novel method for the specification and selection of criteria-weighted operation modes for the orchestration of services in industrial automation using Petri nets. The objective is to provide to the internal decision support system of a service-oriented automation device or of another applicable computational system the capability to select the best path in a Petri net orchestration model considering different criteria to evaluate the quality of services, such as the time, energy efficiency and reliability. The transition-invariants obtained from the Petri net represent the set of possible modi operandi and these are then weighted with decision criteria. The result will be afterwards evaluated in order to select the optimal modus operandi to be executed by the device. Based on the experiments, this method permits the dynamic optimization of processes in real-time, considering available parameters from devices and other resources.The authors would like to thank the European Commission and the partners of the EU FP6 project “Service-Oriented Cross-layer infrastructure for Distributed smart Embedded devices” (SOCRADES) and the EU FP7 project “Cooperating Objects Network of Excellence” (CONET) for their support

MOOA-CSF: A Multi-Objective Optimization Approach for Cloud Services Finding

Cloud computing performance optimization is the process of increasing the performance of cloud services at minimum cost, based on various features. In this paper, we present a new approach called MOOA-CSF (Multi-Objective Optimization Approach for Cloud Services Finding), which uses supervised learning and multi-criteria decision techniques to optimize price and performance in cloud computing. Our system uses an artificial neural network (ANN) to classify a set of cloud services. The inputs of the ANN are service features, and the classification results are three classes of cloud services: one that is favorable to the client, one that is favorable to the system, and one that is common between the client and system classes. The ELECTRE (ÉLimination Et Choix Traduisant la REalité) method is used to order the services of the three classes. We modified the genetic algorithm (GA) to make it adaptive to our system. Thus, the result of the GA is a hybrid cloud service that theoretically exists, but practically does not. To this end, we use similarity tests to calculate the level of similarity between the hybrid service and the other benefits in both classes. MOOA-CSF performance is evaluated using different scenarios. Simulation results prove the efficiency of our approach.

Towards a Unifying View of QoS-Enhanced Web Service Description and Discovery Approaches

The number of web services increased vastly in the last years. Various providers offer web services with the same functionality, so for web service consumers it is getting more complicated to select the web service, which best fits their requirements. That is why a lot of the research efforts point to discover semantic means for describing web services taking into account not only functional characteristics of services, but also the quality of service (QoS) properties such as availability, reliability, response time, trust, etc. This motivated us to research current approaches presenting complete solutions for QoS enabled web service description, publication and discovery. In this paper we present comparative analysis of these approaches according to their common principals. Based on such analysis we extract the essential aspects from them and propose a pattern for the development of QoS-aware service-oriented architectures

A Review on Framework and Quality of Service Based Web Services Discovery

Selection of Web services (WSs) is one of the most important steps in the application of different types of WSs such as WS composition systems and the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) registries. The more available these WSs on the Internet are, the wider the number of these services whose functions match the various service requests is. Selecting WSs with higher quality largely depends on the quality of service (QoS) since it plays a significant role in selecting such services. In achieving this selection of the best WSs, the potential WSs are ranked according to the user’s necessities on service quality. In many cases, the value of QoS ontology is realized by its support for nonfunctional features of WSs. This ontology is also capable of providing solutions to the interoperability of QoS description. Moreover, based on the QoS ontology, it becomes more possible to develop a framework of semantic WS discovery. The framework enhances the automatic discovery of WSs and can improve the users’ efficiency in finding the best web services. Thus, Web Services are software functionalities publish and accessible through the Internet. Different protocols and web mechanism have been defined to access these Services

Dynamic selection of redundant web services

In the domain of Web Services, it is not uncommon to find redundant services that provide functionalities to the clients. Services with the same functionality can be clustered into a group of redundant services. Respectively, if a service offers different functionalities, it belongs to more than one group. Having various Web Services that are able to handle the client's request suggests the necessity of a mechanism that selects the most appropriate Web Service at a given moment of time. This thesis presents an approach, Virtual Web Services Layer, for dynamic service selection based on virtualization on the server side. It helps managing redundant services in a transparent manner as well as allows adding services to the system at run-time. In addition, the layer assures a level of security since the consumers do not have direct access to the Web Services. Several selection techniques are applied to increase the performance of the system in terms of load-balancing, dependability, or execution time. The results of the experiments show which selection techniques are appropriate when different QoS criteria of the services are known and how the correctness of this information influences on the decision-making process

Integrating peer-to-peer into web services

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is emerging as a new standard for building large loosely coupled systems. Web Services, the dominant implementation platform for SOA, use a server-centric approach to manage all components. This limits the deployment of Web Services to static domains, since a service invocation will fail if the server component changes its availability or location. This research focuses on the possibilities of integrating P2P technology into the Web Services environment as a means of increasing its robustness. A P2P-Web Services architecture is presented that enables service discovery and service invocations in dynamic environments. The corresponding experiments on the reference system and the simulation system present the characteristics and improvements of the hybrid system

A framework for autonomic web service selection

Web services are a form of distributed computing. As applications accessible over standard internet protocols, web services allow access to disparate computational resources. Recently, with an increased commoditization of web services, there has been a greater interest in the problem of selection. If a web service client can be configured to use one of a number of different web services, which should it select? In this thesis, an approach based on examining the past quality of service (QoS) parameters of similar clients is presented. Standard web service clients are augmented to report their experiences, and can reason over both these and the experiences of others using a number of formal techniques, thereby arriving at an informed decision