A moth‐flame optimization algorithm for web service composition in cloud computing: Simulation and verification

In recent years, users are becoming increasingly accustomed to using the Internet to gain software resources in the form of web services provided by information technology organizations. Cloud computing is a service delivery paradigm that shares services and resources to access the web services to the end users over the Internet. In the cloud environment, based on the user's needs, various types of services with similar functionalities but different quality‐of‐service (QoS) criteria can be delivered, which often must be combined to meet the users' requests. The optimal selection and composition of these services are realized as an interesting issue. In this paper, we propose a moth‐flame optimization (MFO) algorithm, which is a novel nature‐inspired metaheuristic paradigm for the web service composition (WSC) problem called “MFO‐WSC,” to improve the QoS criteria in the distributed cloud environment. Also, formal modeling is presented for the QoS‐aware MFO‐WSC algorithm with the model checking approach that receives the particular benefits to collaborate the correctness of the proposed algorithm. The correctness of the proposed behavior model is examined using some logical problems such as deadlock‐free, fairness, and reachability conditions in the new symbolic model verifier model checker. The experimental results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in comparison with similar related works.