Quality-of-service oriented web service composition algorithm and planning architecture

In the next few decades, it is expected that web services will proliferate, many web services will offer the same services, and the clients will demand more value added and informative services rather than those offered by single, isolated web services. As the result, the problem of synthesizing web services of high quality will be raised as a prominent issue. The clients will face the trouble of choosing or creating composition plans, among numerous possible plans, that satisfy their quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. Typical QoS properties associated with a web service are the execution cost and time, availability, successful execution rate, reputation, and usage frequency. In engineering perspective, generating the composition plan that fulfills a client's QoS requirement is a time-consuming optimization problem. To resolve the problem in a timely manner, we propose a constraint satisfaction based web service composition algorithm that combines tabu search and simulated annealing meta-heuristics. As an implementation framework of the algorithm, we suggest a QoS-oriented web service composition planning architecture. The architecture maintains expert made composition schemas in a service category and assists the client as pure user to choose the one he/she wants to use. The main modules of the architecture are composition broker and execution plan optimizer. With the aid of the UDDI server, the composition broker discovers candidate outsourced web services for each atomic process of the selected schema and gathers QoS information on the web services. After that, the execution plan optimizer runs the web service composition algorithm in order to generate a QoS-oriented composition plan. The performance of the algorithm was tested in a simulated environment.