Service Offer Discovery Using Genetic Algorithms

Available service descriptions are often specified using abstract definitions of service attributes. However, service consumers are mainly interested in concrete, consumable service offers which are specified using concrete values of service attributes. Service offers, due to their request dependence and dynamicity, have to be generated on-the-fly what may require interaction with a service. We propose a service description model that facilitates creation of consumable service offers. A large number of service offers can be generated considering flexible search requests. In order to address that, we propose a novel approach to dynamic generation of service offers. Our approach is based on genetic algorithms and reduces the number of relevant service offers. For evaluation purposes we apply our approach to the shipping domain where real shipping services on the Web are used to prove the effectiveness and usability of our approach in a real-world domain.