Service Matching under Consideration of Explicitly Specified Service Variants

One of the main ideas of Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is the delivery of flexibly composable services provided on world-wide markets. For a successful service discovery, service requests have to be matched with the available service offers. However, in a situation in which no service that completely matches the request can be discovered, the customer may tolerate slight discrepancies between request and offer. Some existing fuzzy matching approaches are able to detect such service variants, but they do not allow to explicitly specify which parts of a request are not mandatory. In this paper, we improve an existing service matching approach based on Visual Contracts leveraging our preliminary work of design pattern detection. Thereby, we support explicit specifications of service variants and realize gradual matching results that can be ranked in order to discover the service offer that matches a customer's request best.