Multi-objective and discrete Elephants Herding Optimization algorithm for QoS aware web service composition

Abstract

The goal of QoS aware web service composition (QoS-WSC) is to provide new functionalities and find a best combination of services to meet complex needs of users. QoS of the resulting composite service should be optimized. QoS-WSC is a global multi-objective optimization problem belonging to NP-hard class given the number of available services. Most of existing approaches reduce this problem to a single-objective problem by aggregating different objectives, which leads to a loss of information. An alternative issue is to use Pareto-based approaches. The Pareto-optimal set contains solutions that ensure the best trade-off between conflicting objectives. In this paper, a new multi-objective meta-heuristic bio-inspired Pareto-based approach is presented to address the QoS-WSC, it is based on Elephants Herding Optimization (EHO) algorithm. EHO is characterised by a strategy of dividing and combining the population to sub population (clan) which allows exchange of information between local searches to get a global optimum. However, the application of others evolutionary algorithms to this problem cannot avoids the early stagnancy in a local optimum. In this paper a discrete and multi-objective version of EHO will be presented based on a crossover operator. Compared with SPEA2 (Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm 2) and MOPSO (Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm), the results of experimental evaluation show that our improvements significantly outperform the existing algorithms in term of Hypervolume, Set Coverage and Spacing metrics.