Service process composition with QoS and monitoring agent cost parameters

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides a flexible paradigm to dynamically compose service processes from individual services. The flexibility, on the other hand, makes it necessary to monitor and manage service behaviors at runtime for performance assurance. One solution is to deploy software monitoring agents. In this paper, we present an approach to consider agent cost at process composition by selecting services with lower monitoring costs. We propose two algorithms to perform service selection with agent cost. IGA is able to achieve efficient service selection and bounded agent cost by modeling the problem as the Weighted Set Covering (WSC) problem. We also study a heuristic algorithm to estimate the agent cost as part of the service utility function. The execution time of heuristic algorithm is shorter than IGA. On the other hand, the agent cost may not be consistently minimized using heuristic algorithms.