Track: Web Services
Paper Title:
Preference-based Selection of Highly Configurable Web Services
Authors:
Abstract:
A key challenge for dynamic Web service selection is that Web services are typically highly configurable and service requesters often have dynamic preferences on service configurations. Current approaches, such as WS-Agreement, describe Web services by enumerating the various possible service configurations, an inefficient approach when dealing with numerous service attributes with large value spaces. We model Web service configurations and associated prices and preferences more compactly using utility function policies, which also allows us to draw from multi-attribute decision theory methods to develop an algorithm for optimal service selection. In this paper, we present an OWL ontology for the specification of configurable Web service offers and requests, and a flexible and extensible framework for optimal service selection that combines declarative logic-based matching rules with optimization methods, such as linear programming. Assuming additive price/preference functions, experimental results indicate that our algorithm introduces an overhead of only around 2 sec. compared to a random service selection, while giving optimal results. The overhead, as percentage of total time, decreases as the number of offers and configurations increase.
