Towards an Integrated Service Rating and Ranking Methodology for Quality Based Service Selection in Automatic Service Composition

The paradigm shift from purchasing monolithic software solutions to a dynamic composition of individual solutions entails many new possibilities yet great challenges, too. In order to satisfy user requirements, complex services have to be automatically composed of elementary services. Multiple possibilities of composing a complex service inevitably emerge. The problem of selecting the most appropriate services has to be solved by comparing the different service candidates with respect to their quality in terms of inherent non-functional properties while simultaneously taking the user requirements into account. We are aiming for an integrated service rating and ranking methodology in order to support the automation of the underlying decision-making process. The main contribution of this paper is a first decomposition of the quality-based service selection process, while emphasizing major issues and challenges, which we are addressing in the On-The-Fly Computing project.