QoS-based Selection of Services: The Implementation of a Genetic Algorithm

Abstract:
In today’s businesses we can see the trend that service-oriented architectures (SOA) represent the main paradigm for IT infrastructures. In this setting, software offers its functionality as an electronic service to other software in a network. In order to realise more complex tasks or business processes that are comprised of individual services, compositions of these are formed. Thus, several research efforts cover the creation of service compositions, including their modelling, development and provision. In this setting, individual services must be selected that perform the tasks of the composition. This selection can consider the quality-of-service (QoS). This paper discusses the optimisation problem when selecting services while considering different QoS characteristics. For this problem, we investigate the application of a genetic algorithm. Based on previous research work, the implementation of this algorithm is tested in our simulation environment SENECA in order to compare its performance with other approaches. Furthermore we use the simulation environment in order to determine the impact of different parameters (e.g. mutation rate, fitness function) on the optimisation capability of the genetic algorithm.