Efficient QoS-Aware Service Composition with a Probabilistic Service Selection Policy

Service-Oriented Architecture enables the composition of loosely coupled services provided with varying Quality of Service (QoS) levels. Given a composition, finding the set of services that optimizes some QoS attributes under given QoS constraints has been shown to be NP-hard. Until now the problem has been considered only for a single execution, choosing a single service for each workflow element. This contrasts with reality where services often are executed hundreds and thousands of times. Therefore, we modify the problem to consider repeated executions of services in the long-term. We also allow to choose multiple services for the same workflow element according to a probabilistic selection policy. We model this modified problem with Linear Programming, allowing us to solve it optimally in polynomial time. We discuss and evaluate the different applications of our approach, show in which cases it yields the biggest utility gains, and compare it to the original problem.