LP-WSC: a linear programming approach for web service composition in geographically distributed cloud environments

In recent years, cloud computing has emerged as the most popular technologies for accessing and delivering enterprise applications as the services to the end users over the Internet. Since different enterprises may offer web services with various capabilities, these web services can be combined with other to provide the complete functionality of a large software application to meet the users’ requests. Therefore, the service composition as an NP-hard optimization problem to combine the distributed and heterogeneous web services is introduced as a challenging issue. In this work, we propose a linear programming approach to web service composition problem which is called ‘LP-WSC’ to select the most efficient service per request in a geographically distributed cloud environment for improving the quality-of-service criteria. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of our approach under three scenarios with varying the number of atomic services per set. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach significantly reduces the cost of selection and composition of the services and also increases the availability of services and the reliability of the servers compared with the other approaches.