Priority-Based Selection of Individuals in Memetic Algorithms for Distributed Data-Intensive Web Service Compositions

In distributed computing, Web Service Composition (WSC) leads to the effective reuse of existing services and produces added value. WSC must fulfil functional requirements and optimise Quality of Service (QoS) attributes, simultaneously. Memetic Algorithms (MAs) are promising for automatically composing numerous Web services to satisfy the above requirements. Data-intensive Web services focus on providing and updating data with a significant volume of data operation and exchange. However, current composition approaches have ignored the impact of data communication and the distribution of services, which significantly affect the performance when applied to the challenging Distributed Data-intensive Web Service Composition (DDWSC) problem. Although recent approaches have revealed the usefulness of local search, they have completely overlooked the question of preferring appropriate composition solutions for local search. To address this research issue, we propose a priority-based selection method for the local search that can be consistently integrated with any MA for DDWSC. This enables us to develop state-of-the-art algorithms for DDWSC by explicitly considering the problem-specific, population and solution-related information for choosing a solution. Extensive experimental evaluation using benchmark datasets shows that our proposed method significantly outperforms several recently proposed methods.