Syndicating Web Services: A QoS and user-driven approach

Web Services that provide a real-time e-business solution via online binding of software components must have a mechanism to win users’ confidence in the quality of service (QoS) to establish a solid foot holding in the market. Inspired by the trust third-party approach in the public key system, we explored the idea of expanding the role of registrars to include (1) assessing quality of Web Services and (2) syndicating Web Services. The Analytic Hierarchy Process and the Brown–Gibson methods were adapted to facilitate quality assessment. An optimization model was proposed for Web Service syndication. A heuristic algorithm was developed to solve the NP-hard problem, and an experiment was conducted, with two sensitivity analyses involving adjusting parameters, to compare its performance and the optimal solutions.