A fuzzy operator based bat algorithm for cloud service composition

Cloud manufacturing service composition is an important issue in the cloud manufacturing mode. Because the number of services is large scale, the problem is NP hard. The conventional algorithm cannot get the satisfactory solution in the limited time. Therefore, the heuristic algorithms are always used to solve the problem. Although they can give a feasible solution in a limited time, the precision of the solution is still to be improved. A Fuzzy operator based Bat algorithm FBAT is presented to deal with the cloud service composition problem. In FBAT, the fuzzy encoding and decoding operations are put forward to replace the original real number coding and decoding operations in the bat algorithm. In addition, a virtual bat is introduced to utilise the historical useful information to guide the flying direction of bats, which helps improve the convergence speed of the algorithm. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm is promising in terms of precision, compared with the particle swarm optimisation and differential evolution algorithms.