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Genetic programming for QoS-aware web service composition and selection

Soft Computing volume 20, pages 3851–3867 (2016)Cite this article

Abstract

Web services, which can be described as functionality modules invoked over a network as part of a larger application are often used in software development. Instead of occasionally incorporating some of these services in an application, they can be thought of as fundamental building blocks that are combined in a process known as Web service composition. Manually creating compositions from a large number of candidate services is very time consuming, and developing techniques for achieving this objective in an automated manner becomes an active research field. One promising group of techniques encompasses evolutionary computing, which can effectively tackle the large search spaces characteristic of the composition problem. Therefore, this paper proposes the use of genetic programming for Web service composition, investigating three variations to ensure the creation of functionally correct solutions that are also optimised according to their quality of service. A variety of comparisons are carried out between these variations and two particle swarm optimisation approaches, with results showing that there is likely a trade-off between execution time and the quality of solutions when employing genetic programming and particle swarm optimisation. Even though genetic programming has a higher execution time for most datasets, the results indicate that it scales better than particle swarm optimisation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, P.O. Box 600, Wellington, 6140, New Zealand

    Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva, Hui Ma & Mengjie Zhang

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  1. Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva
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  2. Hui Ma
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  3. Mengjie Zhang
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Correspondence to Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Communicated by B. Xue and A. G. Chen.

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da Silva, A.S., Ma, H. & Zhang, M. Genetic programming for QoS-aware web service composition and selection. Soft Comput 20, 3851–3867 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-016-2096-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-016-2096-z

Keywords

  • Web service composition
  • Quality of service
  • Genetic programming
  • Conditional constraints