TQoS: Transactional and QoS-Aware Selection Algorithm for Automatic Web Service Composition

Web Services are the most famous implementation of service-oriented architectures that has brought some challenging research issues. One of these is the composition, i.e., the capability to recursively construct a composite Web service as a workflow of other existing Web services, which are developed by different organizations and offer diverse functionalities (e.g., ticket purchase, payment), transactional properties (e.g., compensatable or not), and Quality of Service (QoS) values (e.g., execution price, success rate). The selection of a Web service, for each activity of the workflow, meeting the user's requirements, is still an important challenge. Indeed, the selection of one Web service among a set of them that fulfill some functionalities is a critical task, generally depending on a combined evaluation of QoS. However, the conventional QoS-aware composition approaches do not consider the transactional constraints during the composition process. This paper addresses the issue of selecting and composing Web services not only according to their functional requirements but also to their transactional properties and QoS characteristics. We propose a selection algorithm that satisfies user's preferences, expressed as weights over QoS criteria and as risk levels defining semantically the transactional requirements. Proofs and experimental results are presented.