A Hybrid Metaheuristic Based on Variable Neighborhood Search and Tabu Search for the Web Service Selection Problem

One of the main ideas of the Service Oriented Approach is to provide complex functionality by combining the functionality of several services into a single composition. Once the services providing the required functionality for each component of the composition have been identified, it is necessary to select the set of services with the best overall Quality of Service (QoS) utility. This optimal set of services must also satisfy the given QoS requirements. For the first time a hybrid approach, combining the strengths of VNS and Tabu Search, is used for solving the web service selection problem. The results were compared to the results obtained by applying the Tabu Search and VNS algorithms separately on the same test instances and have shown that the hybrid algorithm outperforms both of them for larger problems.