Flexible and intelligent architecture for quality-based Web service discovery with an agent-based approach

Service-oriented architecture constitute a key technology for providing interoperability among heterogeneous systems, and integrating inter-organization applications in a loosely coupled fashion. However, the rapid growth of Web Services on the Internet makes services discovery become harder. Quality of Service is the key factor to differentiate web services with same functionality. In order to distinguish those similar functional services, quality criteria play a crucial role in selecting Web services in terms of their quality. According to a set of QoS criteria, candidate Web services are ranked by using some algorithm to find the best suitable Web services. The functional properties describe what the service can do and the nonfunctional properties depict how the service can do it. In this paper, we propose a Web service discovery architecture scheme based on user's requirement of the various non-functional properties along with functional requirements and interaction with the system. We propose a novel approach for designing and developing an agent-based architecture and its Quality Matching, Feedback Rating and Service Discovery algorithm for evaluating web services. The paper presents an effective approach for finding the most suitable web service according to the consumer's requirements.