Search based approach to forecasting QoS attributes of web services using genetic programming

Context: Currently, many service operations performed in service-oriented software engineering (SOSE) such as service composition and discovery depend heavily on Quality of Service (QoS). Due to factors such as varying loads, the real value of some dynamic QoS attributes (e.g., response time and availability) changes over time. However, most of the existing QoS-based studies and approaches do not consider such changes; instead, they are assumed to rely on the unrealistic and static QoS information provided by service providers, which may seriously impair their outcomes. Objective: To predict dynamic QoS values, the objective is to devise an approach that can generate a predictor to perform QoS forecasting based on past QoS observations. Method: We use genetic programming (GP), which is a type of evolutionary computing used in search based software engineering (SBSE), to forecast the QoS attributes of web services. In our proposed approach, GP is used to search and evolve expression-based, one-step-ahead QoS predictors. To evaluate the performance (accuracy) of our GP-based approach, we also implement most current time series forecasting methods; a comparison between our approach and these other methods is discussed in the context of real-world QoS data. Results: Compared with common time series forecasting methods, our approach is found to be the most suitable and stable solution for the defined QoS forecasting problem. In addition to the numerical results of the experiments, we also analyze and provide detailed descriptions of the advantages and benefits of using GP to perform QoS forecasting. Additionally, possible validity threats using the GP approach and its validity for SBSE are discussed and evaluated. Conclusions: This paper thoroughly and completely demonstrates that under a realistic situation (with real-world QoS data), the proposed GP-based QoS forecasting approach provides effective, efficient, and accurate forecasting and can be considered as an instance of SBSE. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.