A new discrete imperialist competitive algorithm for QoS-aware service composition in cloud computing

Abstract

In this paper, an effective Discrete Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (DICA) is proposed to solve the QoS-aware cloud service composition problem, which is known as a non-polynomial combinatorial problem. To improve the global exploration ability of DICA, as inspired by the solution search equation of Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm, a new discrete assimilation policy process is proposed, and differently from the assimilation strategy of the original ICA, colonies moved toward their imperialists by integrating information of other colonies in the moving process. To enhance the local exploitation of DICA and to accelerate the convergence of our algorithm, the proposed assimilation process is also applied among imperialists. The performance of the proposed DICA is evaluated by comparing DICA with other recent algorithms, and the obtained results show the effectiveness of our DICA.