Abstract
A major benefit of service composition is the ability to support agile global collaborative virtual organizations. However, being global in nature, collaborative virtual organizations can have several virtual industry clusters (VIC), where each VIC has hundreds to thousands of virtual enterprises that provide functionally similar services exposed as web services. These web services can be differentiated on a high dimensionality of quality of service attributes. The dilemma the virtual enterprise broker is faced with is how to dynamically select the best combination of component services to fulfill a complex consumer need within the shortest time possible. This composite service selection problem remains a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) NP hard problem. Although existing MCDM methods based on local planning are linearly scalable for large problems, they lack capabilities to express critical intertask constraints that are practically relevant to service consumers. MCDM global planning methods on the other hand suffer exponential state space explosion making them severely limited for large problems of industrial relevance. This paper proposes HMSCM: Hierarchical Multi-Layer Service Composition Model. HMSCM is based on the theory of Layering as Optimization Decomposition (28-31). We view the service selection process as a layer network where each layer is a subproblem to be solved. The objective of one of the layers is to maximize a local utility function over a subset of web service QoS attributes from a service consumer perspective. The objective of the other layer is to maximize a local utility function over another subset of web service QoS attributes from the perspective of the Virtual enterprise broker. We develop the algorithm: Service Layered Utility Maximization (SLUM) that extends the Mixed Integer programming model in (9). We then formulate the problem at each layer in form of SLUM. Together, the two layers attempt to achieve the global optimization objective of the network. We show analytically how HMSCM overcomes the shortcomings of existing local planning and global planning service selection methods while retaining the strengths from each. i.e HMSCM is able to scale linearly with increasing number of QoS variables and number of web services while being able to enforce global intertask constraints.
Highlights
We argue that layering as optimization decomposition formalism is rooted in the Network Utility Maximization problem, the complexity of issues involved in the web service selection problem closely resemble the network utility maximization problem (NUM) [32] problem
We achieve the service provider view through the functions of Layer 1. This approach differs from all existing works, where quality of service (QoS) aware service selection is entirely viewed from the end user perspective, the consequence being that the user is overburdened in specifying weights and preferences over a large set of QoS some of which are too technical to make direct sense to an average user
Service composition continues to be acknowledged as the most agile technology approach to support dynamic business to business collaborations such as those found in global virtual organizations
Summary
Global virtual organizations are increasingly relying on service oriented architecture (SOA) as an information technology framework to quickly create value added business services from simple loosely coupled distributed services. Studies such as those in [2], [3],[4] confirm this claim. Even when the differentiating factor is a single QoS parameter, the sheer numbers of services make the selection of the best composite service a challenge. To put this into perspective, consider a composite travel reservation product that contains four simple services: flight service, hotel service, insurance package and a taxi service. Algorithms that linearly scale with change in number of candidate services despite exponential growth in solution space are sought
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