A Survey of Fuzzy Service Matching Approaches in the Context of On-The-Fly Computing

In the last decades, development turned from monolithic software products towards more flexible software components that can be provided on world-wide markets in form of services. Customers request such services or compositions of several services. However, in many cases, discovering the best services to address a given request is a tough challenge and requires expressive, gradual matching results, considering different aspects of a service description, e.g., inputs/ouputs, protocols, or quality properties. Furthermore,in situations in which no service exactly satifies the request, approximate matching which can deal with a certain amount of fuzziness becomes necessary. There is a wealth of service matching approaches, but it is not clear whether there is a comprehensive, fuzzy matching approach which addresses all these challenges. Although there are a few service matchingsurveys, none of them is able to answer this question. In this paper, we perform a systematic literature survey of 35 (outof 504) service matching approaches which consider fuzzy matching. Based on this survey, we propose a classication,discuss how different matching approaches can be combined into a comprehensive matching method, and identify future research challenges.