Price Heuristics for Highly Efficient Profit Optimization of Service Composition

Service composition follows a three-party paradigm, i.e., a broker mediates between service providers and service consumers to properly select and compose a set of distributed services together so that requirements raised by consumers are satisfied by the composite service on demand. As the de facto provider of composite services, the broker charges the consumers, on the other hand, it awards cost to the providers whose services are involved in the composite services. Besides traditional quality-oriented optimization from the consumers' point of view, the profit that a broker could earn from the composition is another objective to be optimized. But just as the quality optimization, service selection for profit optimization suffers from dramatic efficiency decline along with the growth in the number of candidate services. On the premise that the expected quality are guaranteed, this paper presents a "divide and select" approach for high-efficiency profit optimization, with price as heuristics. This approach can be applied to both static and dynamic pricing scenarios of service composition. Experiments demonstrate the feasibility.