Multi-criteria selection for services selection in service workflow

Selecting services to be part of a workflow has been a very important challenge. As a number of available services increases, the selection becomes more complicated. Different providers may offer the same service with different non-functional attributes such as services’ qualities, past experience, reputation value, etc. Moreover, the importance of each attribute is subjective and varies in different contexts of use. Complexity increases due to dynamic changes in real-time service workflow interoperation, for example, services can dynamically join or leave at any time, attributes can be changed, or the importance of an attribute can be lessened or increased. To alleviate this problem, this paper presents a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach for dynamic real-time service selection in service workflow. The main study emphasizes on an integrated architecture with the enhancement of compliance checking for Service Workflow Specification language (SWSpec) with MCDM using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). This approach enables real-time service selection based on the degree of compliance, in which depending on each context the best-suited services can be determined. To make this approach more understandable, an application example of car rental agent is demonstrated.