A Cooperative Evolution for QoS-driven IoT Service Composition

To facilitate the automation process in the Internet of Things, the research issue of distinguishing prospective services out of many "similar" services, and identifying needed services w.r.t the criteria of Quality of Service (QoS), becomes very important. To address this aim, we propose heuristic optimization, as a robust and efficient approach for solving complex real world problems. Accordingly, this paper devises a cooperative evolution approach for service composition under the restrictions of QoS. A series of effective strategies are presented for this problem, which include an enhanced local best first strategy and a global best strategy that introduces perturbations. Simulation traces collected from real measurements are used for evaluating the proposed algorithms under different service composition scales that indicate that the proposed cooperative evolution approach conducts highly efficient search with stability and rapid convergence. The proposed algorithm also makes a well-designed trade-off between the population diversity and the selection pressure when the service compositions occur on a large scale.