Reliable Web service selection in choreographed environments

• Published in: Decision Support Systems 2013-02, Vol.54 (3), p.1463-1476
• Main Authors: Hwang, San-Yih, Lee, Chien-Hsiang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Composite web services; Computer science; control theory; systems; Computer systems and distributed systems. User interface; Confidentiality; Decision making models; Decision support systems; Decision theory. Utility theory; Demand; Exact sciences and technology; Exchange; Information sharing; Internet service providers; Marketing; Mathematical problems; Operational research and scientific management; Operational research. Management science; Optimization of services composition; Quality of services; Reliability; Reliability theory. Replacement problems; Software; Studies; Web services; Web services choreography
• ISSN: 0167-9236; 1873-5797
• DOI: 10.1016/j.dss.2012.12.017

Previous research into Web service selection mainly uses an orchestration model, in which a single entity is responsible for the selection and invocation of various Web services. However in many application scenarios, each Web service independently performs a selection, even though achieving the business's goals demands collective, pairwise interactions across the total set of Web services. This study instead considers the Web service selection problem in a choreographed environment, in which each Web service maintains its confidentiality about its collaborators and exchanges only limited amounts of information with its partners. The goal is to maximize the likelihood of completing the entire choreography in a failure-prone environment. Several experiments show that the proposed method performs similarly to a centralized method and better than three distributed Web service selection methods that involve various degrees of information about other services. ► We identify the confidentiality requirement in a choreographed environment. ► We show how to summarize the behaviors of each Web service and its partners. ► We develop a Web service selection framework that respects confidentiality. ► We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach.