A Fuzzy Partial Ordering Approach for QoS-based Selection of Web Services

Abstract

As the development of Service-Oriented Computing (SOC), more and more functional similar Web services are deployed over the Internet. Nowadays, Web service selection becomes a crucial issue for making SOC more applicable. Troublesome Web services will affect the reliability of the whole SOC application which invokes the service. Therefore, when choosing Web services, not only the functional attributes but also the Quality of Service (QoS) should also be considered. In this work, we develop a framework to collect the indices of service quality, including runtime and non-runtime indices. A fuzzy partial-ordering approach, which takes both quality indices and their uncertainties into consideration, is proposed to evaluate Web services. A series of partial-ordering models has been developed to rank Web services according to their qualities. Case study shows that the proposed approach is effective for selecting the service having the highest synthetic quality from the collections of functional similar services.