A Heuristic Algorithm for Optimal Service Composition in Complex Manufacturing Networks

Service composition in a Cloud Manufacturing environment involves the adaptive and optimal assembly of manufacturing services to achieve quick responses to varied manufacturing needs. It is challenged by the inherent heterogeneity and complexity of these services in terms of their diverse and complex functions, qualities of service, execution paths, etc. In this paper, a manufacturing network is constructed to explicitly identify and describe the relationships between individual services based on their attributes. On this basis, the service composition problem can be modeled as a multiple‐constrained optimal path (MCOP) selection problem by taking into account different types of composition, namely, sequence, parallel, selection, and cycle. A novel Dual Heuristic Functions based Optimal Service Composition Path algorithm (DHA_OSCP) is proposed to solve the NP‐Complete MCOP problem, which involves exploiting the backward search procedure with different search targets to obtain two heuristic functions for the forward search procedure. The proposed algorithm is evaluated through a set of computational experiments in which the proposed algorithm and other popular algorithms such as MFPB_HOSTP are applied to the same dataset, and the results obtained show that DHA_OSCP can efficiently find the optimal service composition path with better Quality of Service (QoS). The viability of DHA_OSCP is further proved in a case study of services composition on a Cloud Manufacturing platform.