A Hybrid Strategy Improved Whale Optimization Algorithm for Web Service Composition

• Published in: Computer journal Vol. 66; no. 3; pp. 662 - 677
• Main Authors: Ju, Chuanxiang, Ding, Hangqi, Hu, Benjia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press 15.03.2023
• Subjects: hybrid strategy; whale optimization algorithm; quality of service; web services; service composition
• ISSN: 0010-4620; 1460-2067
• DOI: 10.1093/comjnl/bxab187

Abstract With the rapid growth of the number of web services on the Internet, various service providers provide many similar services with the same function but different quality of service (QoS) attributes. It is a key problem to be solved urgently to select the service composition quickly, meeting the users’ QoS requirements from many candidate services. Optimization of web service composition is an NP-hard issue and intelligent optimization algorithms have become the mainstream method to solve this complex problem. This paper proposed a hybrid strategy improved whale optimization algorithm, which is based on the concepts of chaos initialization, nonlinear convergence factor and mutation. By maintaining a balance between exploration and exploitation, the problem of slow or early convergence is overcome to a certain extent. To evaluate its performance more accurately, the proposed algorithm was first tested on a set of standard benchmarks. After, simulations were performed using the real quality of web service dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is better than the original version and other meta-heuristic algorithms on average, as well as verifies the feasibility and stability of web service composition optimization.