Selection of Web Services with Imprecise QoS Constraints

When several functionally equivalent web services are available to perform the same task, their Quality of Service (QoS) characteristics such as performance and reliability become important in the selection process. Consumers that specify their QoS requirements too strictly however, risk not finding any web services meeting their demands. Therefore, in this paper we allow QoS constraints to be described imprecisely as fuzzy sets. We compare the effectiveness of an intelligent web service selection algorithm that takes these imprecise QoS constraints into account with a baseline algorithm acting on precise QoS values.