Probabilistic QoS and soft contracts for transaction based Web services

Web services orchestrations and choreographies require establishing quality of service (QoS) contracts with the user. This is achieved by performing QoS composition, based on contracts established between the orchestration and the called Web services. These contracts are typically stated in the form of hard guarantees (e.g., response time always less than 5 msec). In this paper we propose using soft contracts instead. Soft contracts are characterized by means of probability distributions for QoS parameters. We show how to compose such contracts, to yield a global contract (probabilistic) for the orchestration. Our approach is implemented by the TOrQuE tool. Experiments on TOrQuE show that overly pessimistic contracts can be avoided and significant room for safe overbooking exists.