Study of a linear-physical-programming-based approach for web service selection under uncertain service quality

To promote the practical use of web service technologies, it is critical to select a proper web service that will meet users’ preferences from a pool of web services with similar functions. It is usually a core issue during web service selection to describe and evaluate the quality of these web services. Average value can be employed to describe certain service quality and to evaluate the quality with multiple criteria through the Simple Additive Weight Method. Based on an analysis of various deficiencies in existing approaches proposed in some studies, four indicators were used: Price, Response Time, Reliability and Credibility. On top of that, recent sampling data sets were introduced to describe the uncertain quality of service (QoS) criteria; linear physical programming was used to evaluate QoS with comprehensive criteria to meet the need to objectively describe uncertain QoS criteria, and preference regions were set to adapt to interval characteristics of criteria. Finally, a computational example is provided to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the method.