SEFAP: an efficient approach for ranking skyline web services

With the increasing number of Web services published on the Web, many of services provide the same functionality with different quality of service. Ranking similar web services based on QoS is then an important issue. This paper proposes a hybrid approach to rank-order Skyline Web services, which mixes several methods borrowed from Multi-Criteria Decision Making field. The Skyline method is used to reduce the decision space and focusing only on interesting Web services that are not dominated by any other service. For weighting QoS criteria, we aggregate objective and subjective weights. The objective Entropy weights are extracted directly from invocation history data, however, the subjective weights are calculated using Fuzzy AHP from user opinions. Promethee method is leveraged to rank Skyline Web services, by taking advantage of the outranking relationships between Skyline Web services and generating positive, negative and Net flows. An efficient algorithm to rank-order Skyline Web services on the basis of Net flow is developed. A case study is presented to illustrate the different steps of our approach. The experimental evaluation conducted on real-world datasets demonstrates that our approach can better capture the user preferences and retrieve the best ranked Skyline Web services.