Prioritizing Consumer-Centric NFPs in Service Selection

Service Selection continues to be a challenge in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). In this paper, we propose a consumer-centric Non-Functional Properties (NFP) based services selection approach that relies on an externally-validated set of NFP descriptions integrated with the Web Service Description Language (WSDL). Our approach is based on three steps: (1) a Filtering step based on Hard NFPs defined in the consumer's request, (2) a Matchmaking step to discover the functionally-equivalent services, and (3) a Ranking step that sorts the resulting set of services based on the Soft NFPs defined by the consumer. The evaluation of our proposed service selection approach shows that the prioritization of NFP usage enhances the performance time of the service selection process while satisfying the functional and the nonfunctional requirements of the consumer