IBGSS: An Improved Binary Gravitational Search Algorithm based search strategy for QoS and ranking prediction in cloud environments

Abstract Quality of Service (QoS) value prediction and QoS ranking prediction have their significance in optimal service selection and service composition problems. QoS based service ranking prediction is an NP-Complete problem which examines the order of ranked service sequence with respect to the unique QoS requirements. To address the NP-Complete problem, greedy and optimization-based strategies such as CloudRank and PSO have been widely employed in service oriented environments. However, they pose several challenges with respect to the similarity measure based QoS prediction, trap at local optima, and near optimal solution. Hence, this paper presents Improved Binary Gravitational Search Strategy (IBGSS), an optimization based search strategy to address the challenges in the state-of-the-art QoS value prediction and service ranking prediction techniques. IBGSS employs improved cosine similarity measure, and Newton–Raphson inspired Binary Gravitational Search Algorithm (NR-BGSA) for accurate QoS value prediction and optimal service ranking prediction respectively. The effectiveness of IBGSS over the state-of-the-art QoS value prediction and ranking prediction techniques was validated using two real world QoS datasets, namely WSDream#1 and web service QoS dataset in terms of various statistical measures (Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Average Precision Correlation (APC)).