Web service composition represents a graph of interacting services designed to fulfill user requirements, where each node denotes a service, and each edge represents an interaction between two services. A few candidates with different quality attributes exist on the web for conducting each web service. Consequently, numerous compositions with identical functionality but differing quality attributes can be formed, making the near-optimal composition selection an NP-hard problem. This paper proposes a tool-supported Evolutionary Optimization Algorithm (EOA) for near-optimal composition selection. The proposed EOA is a Discretized and Extended Gray Wolf Optimization (DEGWO) algorithm. This approach first discretizes the continuous solution space and then extends the functionality of GWO to identify global near-optimal solutions while accelerating solution convergence. DEGWO was evaluated in comparison with other related methods in terms of metrics. Experimental results showed DEGWO achieved average improvements of 8%, 39%, and 5% in terms of availability, 36%, 43%, and 30% in terms of response time, and 65%, 53%, and 51% in terms of cost compared to the three leading algorithms, RDGWO+GA, HGWO, and SFLAGA, respectively.
Babamir et al. (Tue,) studied this question.