Multi-Objective Service Composition in Uncertain Environments

Abstract

Web services have the potential to offer the enterprises with the ability to compose internal and external business services in order to accomplish complex processes. Service composition then becomes an increasingly challenging issue when complex and critical applications are built upon services with different QoS criteria. However, most of the existing QoS-aware service composition techniques are simply based on the assumption that multiple QoS criteria, no matter whether these multiple criteria are conflicting or not, can be combined into a single criterion to be optimized, according to some utility functions. In practice, this can be very difficult as these utility functions or weights are not well-known a priori. In addition, the existing approaches are designed to work in certain environments, where the QoS parameters are well-known in advance. These approaches will render fruitless when facing uncertain and dynamic environments, e.g., cloud environments, where no prior knowledge of the QoS parameters is available. In this paper, two novel multi-objective approaches are proposed to handle QoS-aware Web service composition with conflicting objectives and various restrictions on the quality matrices. The proposed approaches use reinforcement learning in order to deal with the uncertainty characteristics inherent in open and dynamic environments. Experimental results reveal the ability of the proposed approaches to find a set of Pareto optimal solutions, which have the equivalent quality to satisfy multiple QoS-objectives with different user preferences.