US 2013/0173388 A1Published application

Methods and systems for service discovery and selection

OwnerDuy Ngan LE, Rajaraman Kanagasabaiinventors

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Abstract

A systems and method are proposed that address the task of locating advertised services satisfying specific requirements described by a service request, and ranking discovered services so as to enable selection of best services among them. Real life scenarios often involve services described with complex pre- and post-conditions, and have Quality of Service (QoS) associated with them. The proposed method and apparatus support a unified matching of functional as well as non-functional service properties: input-output, complex constraints, and QoS. A novel service discovery and selection algorithm can adaptively locate advertised services by performing a flexible matching of the three service properties. The algorithm is capable of returning partially matched services should there be no exact match.

Claims32

Dependent claims

A method for suggesting a plurality of services to a user, the user being associated with a service request SR specified by a request dataset and defining request requirements of a service requested by the user, the request dataset including input-output (IO) data specifying the inputs and outputs of functions describing the requested service, constraint data defining constraints on the requested service, and quality of service (QoS) data defining QoS properties of the requested service,

the method using a database of advertised services, each advertised service being associated with a service profile including IO data specifying the inputs and outputs of functions describing the advertised service, constraint data defining properties of the advertised service, and QoS data defining QoS properties of the advertised service;
the method comprising:
(a) a service discovery operation of comparing the advertised services with the service request, to determine the degree of matching of the IO data, constraint data and QoS data of the request dataset with the corresponding data of the advertised services, and thereby discover advertised services consistent with at least some portion of the request dataset;
and
(b) a service selection operation of:
(i) for each discovered service, using the determined degree of matching of at least the constraint data and QoS data of the request dataset and the corresponding data of the discovered service, to form a numerical compliance measure (SimService) of the compliance of the discovered service with the request dataset;
and
(ii) ranking the discovered services using the numerical compliance measure,
(c) an operation of presenting the user with the one or more most-highly ranked discovered services, whereby the user can select one of the discovered services.

6 more elements

An apparatus for suggesting a plurality of services to a user, the user being associated with a service request SR specified by a request dataset and defining request requirements of a service requested by the user, the request dataset including input-output (IO) data specifying the inputs and outputs of functions describing the requested service, constraints which are data defining constraints on the requested service, and quality of service (QoS) data defining QoS properties of the requested service,

the apparatus comprising:
a database of advertised services, each advertised service being associated with a service profile including IO data specifying the inputs and outputs of functions describing the advertised service, constraint data defining properties of the advertised service, QoS data defining QoS properties of the advertised service;
a processor;
and
a data storage device for storing computer instructions operative, when performed by the processor to cause the processor to perform:
(a) a service discovery operation of comparing the advertised services with the service request, to determine the degree of matching of the IO data, constraint data and QoS data of the request dataset with the corresponding data of the advertised services, and thereby discover advertised services consistent with at least a portion of the request dataset;
and
(b) a service selection operation of:
(i) for each discovered service, using the determined degree of matching of at least the constraint data and QoS data of the request dataset and the corresponding data of the discovered service, to form a numerical compliance measure (SimService) of the compliance of the discovered service with the request dataset;
and
(ii) ranking the discovered services using the numerical compliance measure,
(c) an operation of presenting the user with the one or more most-highly ranked discovered services, whereby the user can select one of the discovered services.

9 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.