A correlation-driven optimal service selection approach for virtual enterprise establishment

A virtual enterprise is an emerging business cooperation model which allows rapid response to the unpredictable market behavior and opportunity. For service oriented enterprises, where computing resources are encapsulated as services and published online, establishing a virtual enterprise can be regarded as a process of service composition. As there are increasing numbers of available services providing similar functionalities but with different quality values, and with potential business correlations among them, it is not trivial to orchestrate a composite service with optimal overall quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we formally propose a business correlation model including both quality correlations and selection correlations, and then present an efficient approach for correlation-driven QoS-aware optimal service selection based on a genetic algorithm. The genetic algorithm is tailored with niching technology, a repair operator and a penalty mechanism. The effectiveness and efficiency of the approach are demonstrated via empirical studies at last.