QoS-Driven Service Composition with Reconfigurable Services

Abstract

Service-oriented architecture provides a framework for achieving rapid system composition and deployment. To satisfy different system QoS requirements, it is possible to select an appropriate set of concrete services and compose them to achieve the QoS goals. In addition, some of the services may be reconfigurable and provide various QoS tradeoffs. To make use of these reconfigurable services, the composition process should consider not only service selection, but also configuration parameter settings. However, existing QoS-driven service composition research does not consider reconfigurable services. Moreover, the decision space may be enormous when reconfigurable services are considered. In this paper, we deal with the issues of reconfigurable service modeling and efficient service composition decision making. We introduce a novel compositional decision making process, CDP, which explores optimal solutions of individual component services and uses the knowledge to derive optimal QoS-driven composition solutions. Experimental studies show that the CDP approach can significantly reduce the search space and achieve great performance gains. We also develop a case study system to validate the proposed approach and the results confirm the feasibility and effectiveness of reconfigurable services.