QoS-Aware Middleware for Web Services Composition

Overview

The paradigmatic shift from a Web of manual interactions to a Web of programmatic interactions driven by Web services is creating unprecedented opportunities for the formation of online Business-to-Business (B2B) collaborations. Since many available Web services provide overlapping or identical functionality, albeit with different Quality of Service (QoS), a choice needs to be made to determine which services are to participate in a given composite service. This paper presents a middleware platform which addresses the issue of selecting Web services for the purpose of their composition in a way that maximizes user satisfaction expressed as utility functions over QoS attributes, while satisfying the constraints set by the user and by the structure of the composite service.