A Hybrid Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for the Service Selection Problem

To tackle the QoS-based service selection problem, a hybrid artificial bee colony algorithm called h-ABC is proposed, which incorporates the ant colony optimizationmechanism into the artificial bee colony optimization process. In this algorithm, a skyline query process is used to filter the candidates related to each service class, which can greatly shrink the search space in case of not losing good candidates, and a flexible self-adaptive varying construct graph is designed to model the search space based on a clustering process. Then, based on this construct graph, different foraging strategies are designed for different groups of bees in the swarm. Finally, this approach is evaluated experimentally using different standard real datasets and synthetically generated datasets and compared with some recently proposed related service selection algorithms. It reveals very encouraging results in terms of the quality of solutions.