Towards Scalability of Quality Driven Semantic Web Service Composition

Optimizating semantic web service compositions is known to be NP-hard, so most approaches restrict the number of services and offer poor scalability. We address the scalability issue by selecting compositions which satisfy a set of constraints rather than attempting to produce an optimal composition. Firstly, we define constraints within an innovative and extensible quality model designed to balance semantic fit (or functional quality) with quality of service (QoS) metrics. The semantic fit criterion evaluates the quality of semantic links between the semantic description of Web services parameters, whilst QoS focuses on non-functional criteria of services. Coupling these criteria allows us to further constrain and select valid compositions. To allow the use of this model in the context of millions of services as foreseen by the strategic EC-funded project SOA4All, we i) formulate the selection problem as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem and ii) test the use of a stochastic search method. Finally we compare the latter with state-of-the-art approaches.