A novel QoS model and computation framework in web service selection

With the rapid development of e-commerce over Internet, web services have attracted much attention in recent years. Nowadays, enterprises are able to outsource their internal business processes as services and make them accessible via the Web. Then they can dynamically combine individual services to provide new value-added services. With the increasing number of web services having equivalent functionality, the binding procedure is driven by some non-functional, Quality of Service (QoS) criteria, such as the money cost, response time, reputation, reliability or a trade-off between them. Thus, an important problem is, given QoS constraints, how to aggregate and leverage individual service's QoS information to derive the optimal QoS of the composite service. In this paper, we propose a novel QoS model for performing flexible service selection. The key idea of the model is to relax users' QoS constraints and try to find the most possible services satisfying users' QoS requirements. Based on the proposed QoS framework, we develop various algorithms for making service selection on individual and composite services. We also introduce a top-k ranking strategy to reflect a user's personalized requirements. Experimental evaluation shows the proposed QoS model is efficient and practical.