A Tensor-Based Approach for the QoS Evaluation in Service-Oriented Environments

Abstract

Multi-agent technologies have been widely applied to many applications, such as in e-markets, cloud computing, service-oriented environments, etc. In real applications, service-oriented environments are open and dynamic, where loosely coupled agents interact to consume and provide services. How to accurately evaluate the potential performance (i.e., QoS) of service providers on the service requested by a service consumer in such open and dynamic environments is a challenging issue in both theory and practice. In this paper, an innovative approach is proposed to evaluate the QoS of service providers in service-oriented environments. The proposed approach first borrows the reference report mechanism from the certified reputation model, so as to efficiently collect reference reports (i.e., historical performance) of service providers in open and dynamic environments. Then, a tensor-based QoS model is proposed to construct multi-dimensional relationships between QoS evaluation factors and the QoS values of service providers based on the collected reference reports. The QoS evaluation factors include the type of services, the performance of service providers, the subjectivity of service consumers, the time slot of reference reports. Finally, a CANDECOMP/PARAFAC decomposition and gradient descent-based mechanism is used to evaluate the QoS values of service providers through completing the missing entry values in the constructed tensor. The uniform random simulation experiments indicate that the proposed approach can achieve efficient and accurate QoS evaluation in service-oriented environments with only limited collected reference reports, especially when some service providers do not have reference reports.