booktitle = "2016 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC)",
title = "A memetic algorithm-based indirect approach to web
service composition",
year = "2016",
pages = "3385--3392",
abstract = "Web service composition is a popular area of
investigation, since it encourages code reuse as
opposed to re-implementing already existing
functionality modules. Performing such compositions
manually can be quite time-consuming, since the
functionality of each service included in a solution
must be fulfilled, while at the same time selecting
candidates with the best possible quality of service
attributes. This work proposes a hill climbing
algorithm that can perform Web service composition in a
fully automated manner, optimising a sequence of
services that is then decoded into the final solution.
The key advantage of this representation is that it
separates the quality optimisation technique from the
enforcement of correctness constraints, thus
simplifying the overall composition process and
preventing solutions from being overly constrained.
While this indirect composition approach has been
investigated earlier, the previous representation
relied on weights for establishing a service sequence
and used PSO as the optimisation technique. In this
work, on the other hand, sequences are directly
represented using a vector of services, which reduces
the overall search space. Additionally, the memetic
algorithm employed in this work is better at exploring
solutions within promising areas of the search space.
Experiments were conducted comparing the memetic
approach with the previously proposed PSO, with two key
findings. Firstly, the new representation reduces the
overall execution time while maintaining the original
solution quality. Secondly, the use of the memetic
local search improves the overall quality of solutions,
though it may incur longer execution times.",