Memetic EDA-Based Approaches to QoS-Aware Fully Automated Semantic Web Service Composition

Quality-of-service (QoS)-aware automated semantic Web service composition aims to find a composite service with optimized or near-optimized QoS and quality of semantic matchmaking within polynomial time. To cope with this NP-hard problem with high complexity, a variety of evolutionary computation (EC) techniques has been developed. To improve the effectiveness and efficiency of these techniques, in this article, we proposed a novel memetic estimation of the distribution algorithm-based approach, namely, MEEDA, to tackle this problem. In particular, MEEDA explores four different domain-dependent local search methods that search for effective composite services by utilizing several neighborhood structures. Apart from that, to significantly reduce the computational time of MEEDA, an efficient local search strategy is introduced by combining a uniform fitness distribution scheme for selecting suitable solutions and stochastic local search operators for effectively and efficiently exploiting neighbors. To better demonstrate MEEDA’s effectiveness and scalability, we create a more challenging, augmented version of the service composition benchmark dataset. Experimental results on this benchmark show that MEEDA with newly developed domain-dependent local search operator, i.e., layer-based constrained one-point swaps, significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms in finding high-quality composite services.