A decomposition-based approach for service composition with global QoS guarantees

Service-oriented architecture has offered an opportunity to quickly and independently develop new business applications from the existing services. Given that many services are available with the same function but different quality of service (QoS) properties, and service users have different QoS preferences, the challenge of service composition is to select appropriate service candidates to maximize the overall utility while satisfying a user's requirements. In this paper, we propose a decomposition-based approach for service composition, in which the utility of a composite service can be computed from the utilities of component services and the constraints of component services can be derived from the constraints of the composite service. Thus, with our approach, it is possible to independently manage the selection of each component service, leading to more scalability and more flexibility for service composition in a dynamic environment. The experiment studies show that our approach can achieve a near-optimal solution with a significantly improved performance in computation time. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.