Title: Sensitive GRASP: combinatorial optimisation of composite web services guided by sensitivity analysis

Authors: Rubens Matos; Paulo R.M. Maciel; Ricardo M.A. Silva

Addresses: Center of Informatics, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil; Federal Institute of Education, Science, and Technology of Sergipe, Lagarto, Brazil ' Center of Informatics, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil ' Center of Informatics, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil

Abstract: The task of designing and tuning computer systems for optimal performance and dependability is complex. This usually involves the choice of manufacturers, service providers, types of components, and possible architectures. Analytical modelling is helpful for planning and predicting the quality-of-service (QoS) measures of a system, and can be especially useful when integrated with optimisation algorithms. This study proposes a sensitive greedy randomised adaptive search procedure (Sensitive GRASP), which uses sensitivity analysis of an analytical model to improve the solutions of a GRASP-based optimisation. Our approach is applied for optimising the reliability and performance of a composite web service. For scenarios with thousands of possible combinations, the proposed approach finds configurations that are closer to the optimal solution than those found by the algorithm without sensitivity analysis with equivalent computational effort.

Keywords: composite web services; GRASP; sensitivity analysis; combinatorial optimisation; Markov chains; analytical modelling; performance evaluation; dependability evaluation; QoS prediction; quality of service; web service composition.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWGS.2016.074183

International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 2016 Vol.12 No.1, pp.63 - 80

Received: 11 Dec 2014
Accepted: 29 Jun 2015
Published online: 14 Jan 2016 *

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