A service composition approach for the fulfillment of temporally sequential requirements

Abstract

Traditional service composition approaches focus on selecting and composing multiple service components together to fulfill one single requirement. But in most real-world scenarios, there are multiple requirements raised by multiple consumers and they form a discrete and uneven flow (i.e., a temporal sequence). Due to the limited number of available services and their limited capacities, how to ensure the equilibrium between the satisfaction degrees of these temporally sequential requirements becomes an important issue to be addressed. This paper proposes an equilibrium-oriented service composition approach taking into account both the limitedness of service capacity and utilization of historical data. The temporal sequential requirements are divided gradually along with the formation of length-flexible time-segments one by one. Based on this segmentation, service capacity is preserved proportionally for the estimated future requirements, and multiple requirements within one segment are ensured to get relatively equal chances of being satisfied with relatively equal quality. Experiments reveal improved sustainability and superior temporal stability of service quality compared with applying traditional methods to this scenario. © 2010 IEEE.