Ant colony optimization applied to web service compositions in cloud computing

Abstract

Rapid developments in cloud computing technology mean that many different web services are now published and available in cloud data centers. There has recently been an increasing amount of interest in web service composition, because it is important in practical applications. However, most traditional service composition methods can only find service composition sequences in a single cloud, and cannot consider a multi-cloud service base. It is challenging to efficiently find a composition across multiple clouds, because it involves service compositions and combinatorial optimization. In this paper, we present a greedy algorithm called Greedy-WSC and an ant colony optimization based algorithm called ACO-WSC, which attempt to select cloud combinations that are feasible and use the minimum number of clouds. Our experimental results show that the proposed ant colony optimization method can effectively and efficiently find cloud combinations with a minimal number of clouds.