QoS-based service optimization using differential evolution

The aim of our research is to find an efficient solution to the services QoS optimization problem. This NP-hard problem is well known in the service-oriented computing field: given a business workflow that includes a set of abstract services and a set of concrete service implementations for each abstract service, the goal is to find the optimal combination of concrete services. The majority of recent proposals indicate the Genetic Algorithms (GA) as the best approach for complex workflows. But this problem usually needs to be solved at runtime, a task for which GA may be too slow. We propose a new approach, based on Differential Evolution (DE), that converges faster and it is more scalable and robust than the existing solutions based on Genetic Algorithms.