Minimum-cost delegation in service composition

The paradigm of automated service composition through the integration of existing services promises a fast and efficient development of new services in cooperative service (e.g., business) environments. Although the “why” part of this paradigm is well understood, many key pieces are missing to utilize the available opportunities. Recently “service communities” where service providers with similar interests can register their services are proposed toward realizing this goal. In these communities, requests for services posed by users can be processed by delegating them to existing services, and orchestrating their executions. We use a service framework similar to the “Roman” model departing from it particularly assuming service requirements are specified in a sequence form. We also extend the framework to integrate activity processing costs into the delegation computation and to have services with bounded storage as opposed to finite storage. We investigate the problem of efficient processing of service requests in service communities and develop polynomial time delegation techniques guaranteeing optimality.     

基于社团服务链的Web服务组合方法

针对Web服务组合的时间效率提高问题,提出了一种基于服务社团和服务链的Web服务组合方法。在构造的服务网络上应用基于信息中心度的服务社团发现方法,将Web服务网络划分为不同的服务社团,然后构造了社团服务链发现算法和基于服务链的Web服务组合算法,这些算法将服务社团内Web服务之间的所有可组合关联转变成服务链,实现了基于社团服务链和服务质量(QoS)剪枝的Web服务组合过程。实验结果表明,与传统的图深度遍历Web服务组合方法相比,基于社团服务链的Web服务组合方法在5个测试集上的响应时间平均提高了46%,最好情况为67%。社团服务链可以有效地减少针对当前服务请求的服务搜索空间,提高服务组合的时间效率。     

基于领域本体的Web服务动态组合模型

给出了领域本体、Web服务及服务组合的形式化描述,综合基于业务流程的动态服务组合和基于服务接口匹配的服务组合方法,提出了一种基于领域本体的Web服务动态组合模型。该模型首先把服务请求分解为业务流程,再对业务流程的每个服务按接口匹配方法分解为组合服务。以客户订购产品为例,说明了领域本体的建立方法和Web服务动态组合模型的应用方法。     

基于服务簇和QoS的Web服务组合方法

针对海量的语义Web 服务组合中如何提高搜索速度和获得最优组合的问题,提出了一种基于服务簇和服务质量(QoS)的快速组合方法。利用预先建立的服务簇进行服务搜索,可以有效缩小搜索空间,降低语义比较的复杂度,快速得到候选服务集合。组合过程中基于服务的最优组合QoS值动态确定阈值进行服务过滤,可以获得多个最优组合。同时采用高效的冗余处理方法保证组合中冗余服务最少,并采用服务簇内部过滤的方法限制候选服务数量,解决了因组合过多造成的运行超时问题。基于海量服务库进行实验,结果表明,服务搜索效率比普通搜索方法可提高几十倍,服务过滤和冗余处理效果明显,可快速获得多个QoS最优的无冗余组合,并且在百万级服务库进行大层次深度的组合时仍可保证良好的运行性能。     

Dynamic web service composition based on OWL-S

Composing existing web services for enterprise applications may enable higher level of reuse. However the composition processes are mostly static and lack of support for runtime redesign. In this paper, we describe our approach to the extension of the OWL-S ontology framework for dynamic web service composition. We raise the level of abstraction and propose an abstract service layer so that web services can be com- posed at the abstract service level instead of the concrete level. Each abstract service is attached with an instance pool including all instances of the abstract service to facilitate fail-over and dynamic compositions.     

Service composition for generic service graphs

Service composition is a promising approach to multimedia service provisioning, due to its ability to dynamically produce new multimedia content, and to customize the content for individual client devices. Previous research work has addressed various aspects of service composition such as composibility, QoS-awareness, and load balancing. However, most of the work has focused on applications where data flow from a single source is processed by intermediate services and then delivered to a single destination. In this paper, we address the service composition problem for multimedia services that can be modeled as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). We formally define the problem and prove its NP hardness. We also design a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem. Our simulation results show that the algorithm is effective at finding low-cost composition solutions, and can trade off computation overhead for better results. When compared with a hop-by-hop approach for service composition, our algorithm can find composition solutions that aress 10% smaller in cost, even when the hop-by-hop approach uses exhaustive searches.     

Accurate sub-swarms particle swarm optimization algorithm for service composition

Service composition (SC) generates various composite applications quickly by using a novel service interaction model. Before composing services together, the most important thing is to find optimal candidate service instances compliant with non-functional requirements. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is known as an effective and efficient algorithm, which is widely used in this process. However, the premature convergence and diversity loss of PSO always results in suboptimal solutions. In this paper, we propose an accurate sub-swarms particle swarm optimization (ASPSO) algorithm by adopting parallel and serial niching techniques. The ASPSO algorithm locates optimal solutions by using sub-swarms searching grid cells in which the density of feasible solutions is high. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improves the accuracy of the standard PSO algorithm in searching the optimal solution of service selection problem.     

Self-scaling cooperative discovery of service compositions in unstructured P2P networks

We propose an efficient technique for improving the performance of automatic and cooperative compositions in unstructured Peer-to-Peer networks during service discovery. The technique exploits a probabilistic forwarding algorithm that uses different sources of knowledge, such as network density and service grouping, to reduce the amount of messages exchanged in the network. The technique, analysed in several network configurations by using a simulator to observe resolution time, recall and message overhead, presents good performance especially in dense and large-scale service networks.     

Secure service composition with information flow control in service clouds

Service clouds built on cloud infrastructures and service-oriented architecture provide users with a novel pattern of composing basic services to achieve complicated tasks. However, in multiple clouds environment, outsourcing data and applications pose a great challenge to information flow security for the composite services, since sensitive data may be leaked to unauthorized attackers during service composition. Although model checking has been considered as a promising approach to enforce information flow security precisely, its high complexity on modeling and the heavy cost on verification cause great burdens to the process of service composition. In this paper, we propose a distributed approach to composing services securely with information flow control. In our approach, each service component is first verified through model checking, and then a compositional verification procedure is executed to ensure the information flow security along with the composition of these services. The experimental results indicate that our approach can reduce the cost of verification compared with the global verification approach.     

S-ABC: A paradigm of service domain-oriented artificial bee colony algorithms for service selection and composition

With the rapid development of Cloud Computing, Big Data, Social Networks, and the Internet of Things, typical service optimization problems (SOPs) such as service selection, service composition and service resource scheduling in the service computing field have become more and more complicated due to the constant enrichment and dynamic aggregation of large number of services, as well as the unceasing variation of user requirements. Meanwhile, with the long-term development and evolution of business in many application domains, some service domain features (such as priori, correlation and similarity) are usually formed, which have strong influences on solving SOPs. Unfortunately, the existing research efforts on SOPs primarily concentrate on designing general algorithms for specific problems without considering the service domain features. This often leads to undesirable results of SOPs. Therefore, how to design a paradigm of service domain-oriented optimization algorithms with service domain features becomes a challenge for providing optimization strategies and algorithms to solve SOPs effectively. By considering the influences of service domain features on solving SOPs, this paper proposes a set of service domain-oriented artificial bee colony algorithms (S-ABC) based on the optimization mechanism of Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) method. Furthermore, by configuring the items and parameters of the S-ABC paradigm in detail, optimization algorithms for particular SOPs (e.g., service selection and composition) could be derived. In this paper, the superiority of our proposed S-ABC is verified through solving concurrent service selection and service composition problem. By exploiting the artificial bee colony algorithms for the optimization problems in service domains, this work makes novel contributions for solving SOPs, as well as extends the theory of the swarm intelligence optimization.     

网格环境下的按需服务引擎

本文探讨了在Web服务和网格服务环境下,一种智能的按需服务引擎的技术框架,它能够提供高效的空间服务管理和共享的能力。文章阐述了主动服务发现、智能服务组合、服务搜索、服务替代和服务客错性等问题,并给出原型系统设计及实现。     

一种高效的车载自组网服务发现策略

人们对车载网络中服务的需求越来越多,而现有的有线网络和一般AdHoc网络的服务发现协议并不适用于车载网络。因此,在车载信息传播协议的基础上,利用服务强度的概念,提出了一种在城区车载网络中能高效选择最优下一跳节点的服务发现策略,成功实现低数据包开销下的车载网络服务发现。通过仿真比较,验证了其较好的可扩展性。     

Time-aware prefetching for on-demand video services in a residential service gateway

With the recent advances in network technology, the number of high-speed networked homes increases rapidly and the enhanced services such as on-demand video services become feasible in terms of market maturity. Another trend is that storage systems become network-accessible. One of the leading network-attached storage systems is the Fiber Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL). As a residential service gateway, the FC-AL-based servers can stably provide high quality video (e.g., DVD quality MPEG-2 stream) with thousands of clients between external service providers and local clients. In addition, in densely populated areas such as New York City, they can be much more cost efficient. Using our end-to-end simulation experiments to combine all the components, we have observed that FC-AL-based streaming servers perform better than SCSI-based systems, but there is still room for performance improvement. We are motivated by the fact that, unlike in SCSI-based systems, all the disks in FC-AL-based severs utilize only a small portion of their caches to a similar degree due to FC-AL fairness arbitration algorithm. Thus, we propose an effective prefetching scheme to improve the performance by further utilizing the disk cache. We show how the proposed scheme can determine the maximum number of prefetched blocks depending on the disk block and cache size. It is also shown how to find the optimal number of blocks transmitted to the FC-AL from the disk cache per FC-AL arbitration. In addition, we describe the cache replacement policy to take full advantage of the sequential access pattern of video files, and explain how to support multiple loops. By analysis and simulation experiments, we show that our prefetching scheme is not able to only increase the total number of concurrent streams significantly by reducing the disk seek time, but it can also further utilize the FC-AL by reducing the overhead of arbitration.

Managing service level agreements in Premium IP networks: a business-oriented approach

This paper presents a market-enabling framework where users, content providers and network operators can interact in the seamless, transparent sale and delivery of a wide range of services. The framework allows for dynamic creation, configuration and delivery of services with quality assurance, via automated management of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). We propose an approach relying on a systemic treatment of business, service and network layer issues, which translates into a layered architecture where components belonging to different levels interact on the basis of a mediation paradigm. We use mediation as a generic term for a combination of negotiation, brokerage and state notification, jointly concurring to the realization of the entire life-cycle of a service.     

Computing compatibility in dynamic service composition

Dynamically composing services requires mechanisms to ensure component services compatible with each other both at all of the syntax, semantic and behavioral level. This paper focuses on the issue of behavioral compatibility in a service composition. It adopts the π-calculus to model service behaviors and interactions in a formal way. Based on the formalization, it proposes a method to automatically check the behavioral compatibility in a qualitative way. Furthermore, it presents an algorithm to compute the compatibility degree in a quantitative way. The algorithm is implemented in a prototype and its performance analysis is also carried out to show that it can help composing services on the fly and ensure the services compatible with each other to provide functions with newly-added values.

面向用户主导问题求解环境的服务组合方法

为提高服务组合的即时性,适应用户业务需求的变化以及服务资源的动态和异构性,提出一种适应用户主导问题求解环境的服务组合方法。探讨了维护服务交互关系的相对稳定性的策略,提出了基于服务相容性的服务聚类规则,基于聚类服务关联图的组合模板构建方法及其最优性的保障手段和组合模板的具体化方法。实验结果表明,该方法可提高服务组合的即时性和适应性,提高服务组合的时间效率。     

Dynamic SLAs management in service oriented environments

The increasing adoption of service oriented architectures across different administrative domains, forces service providers to use effective mechanisms and strategies of resource management in order for them to be able to guarantee the quality levels their customers demands during service provisioning. Service level agreements (SLA) are the most common mechanism used to establish agreements on the quality of a service (QoS) between a service provider and a service consumer. The WS-Agreement specification, developed by the Open Grid Forum, is a Web Service protocol to establish agreements on the QoS level to be guaranteed in the provision of a service. The committed agreement cannot be modified during service provision and is effective until all activities pertaining to it are finished or until one of the signing party decides to terminate it. In B2B scenarios where several service providers are involved in the composition of a service, and each of them plays both the parts of provider and customer, several one-to-one SLAs need to be signed. In such a rigid context the global QoS of the final service can be strongly affected by any violation on each single SLA. In order to prevent such violations, SLAs need to adapt to any possible needs that might come up during service provision. In this work we focus on the WS-Agreement specification and propose to enhance the flexibility of its approach. We integrate new functionality to the protocol that enable the parties of a WS-Agreement to re-negotiate and modify its terms during the service provision, and show how a typical scenario of service composition can benefit from our proposal.     

S-Club: an overlay-based efficient service discovery mechanism in CROWN Grid

Information service plays a key role in grid system, handles resource discovery and management process. Employing existing information service architectures suffers from poor scalability, long search response time, and large traffic overhead. In this paper, we propose a service club mechanism, called S-Club, for efficient service discovery. In S-Club, an overlay based on existing Grid Information Service (GIS) mesh network of CROWN is built, so that GISs are organized as service clubs. Each club serves for a certain type of service while each GIS may join one or more clubs. S-Club is adopted in our CROWN Grid and the performance of S-Club is evaluated by comprehensive simulations. The results show that S-Club scheme significantly improves search performance and outperforms existing approaches. Chunming Hu is a research staff in the Institute of Advanced Computing Technology at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China. He received his B.E. and M.E. in Department of Computer Science and Engineering in Beihang University. He received the Ph.D. degree in School of Computer Science and Engineering of Beihang University, Beijing, China, 2005. His research interests include peer-to-peer and grid computing; distributed systems and software architectures. Yanmin Zhu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He received his B.S. degree in computer science from Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China, in 2002. His research interests include grid computing, peer-to-peer networking, pervasive computing and sensor networks. He is a member of the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society. Jinpeng Huai is a Professor and Vice President of Beihang University. He serves on the Steering Committee for Advanced Computing Technology Subject, the National High-Tech Program (863) as Chief Scientist. He is a member of the Consulting Committee of the Central Government’s Information Office, and Chairman of the Expert Committee in both the National e-Government Engineering Taskforce and the National e-Government Standard office. Dr. Huai and his colleagues are leading the key projects in e-Science of the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and Sino-UK. He has authored over 100 papers. His research interests include middleware, peer-to-peer (P2P), grid computing, trustworthiness and security. Yunhao Liu received his B.S. degree in Automation Department from Tsinghua University, China, in 1995, and an M.A. degree in Beijing Foreign Studies University, China, in 1997, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. degree in computer science and engineering at Michigan State University in 2003 and 2004, respectively. He is now an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests include peer-to-peer computing, pervasive computing, distributed systems, network security, grid computing, and high-speed networking. He is a senior member of the IEEE Computer Society. Lionel M. Ni is chair professor and head of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Lionel M. Ni received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, in 1980. He was a professor of computer science and engineering at Michigan State University from 1981 to 2003, where he received the Distinguished Faculty Award in 1994. His research interests include parallel architectures, distributed systems, high-speed networks, and pervasive computing. A fellow of the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society, he has chaired many professional conferences and has received a number of awards for authoring outstanding papers.     

Semantic-based automatic service composition with functional and non-functional requirements in design time: A genetic algorithm approach

ContextIn recent years, the composition of ready-made and loosely coupled services into desired systems is a common industrial approach and a widely followed research topic in academia. In the field, the current research trend is to automate this composition; however, each of the existing efforts automates only a component of the entire problem. Therefore, a real automation process that addresses all composition concerns is lacking.ObjectiveThe objective is to first identify the present composition concerns and subsequently to devise a compositional approach that covers all concerns. Ultimately, we conduct a number of experiments to investigate the proposed approach.MethodWe identify the current composition concerns by surveying and briefly describing the existing approaches. To include all of the identified concerns, the solution space that must be searched is highly dimensioned. Thus, we adopt a genetic algorithm (GA) due to its ability to solve problems with such characteristics. Proposed GA-based approach is designed with four unusual independent fitness functions. Additionally, experiments are carried out and discussions are presented for verification of the design, including the necessity for and correctness of the independence and priority of the four fitness functions.ResultsThe case studies demonstrate that our approach can automatically generate the required composite services and considers all identified concerns simultaneously. The results confirm the need for the independence of the fitness function and also identify a more efficient priority for these functions.ConclusionsIn this study, we present an all-inclusive automatic composer that does not require human intervention and effort during the composition process and is designed for users who must address multiple composition concerns simultaneously, including requirements for overall functionality, internally workable dataflow, and non-functional transaction and quality-of-service considerations. Such multiple and complex composition requirements cannot be satisfied by any of the previous single-concern composition approaches.