Subgraph Query for Building Service-Based Systems

Given the broad applications of service-oriented architecture (SOA) in service-oriented software engineering, service-based systems (SBSs) built from existing Web services are becoming increasingly popular. As a result, the selection of the appropriate component services to include in SBSs has become a crucial step in the SBS-engineering process. Unfortunately, most of the existing methods require that system engineers have a detailed knowledge of the corresponding SOA techniques, which can incur several limitations, including excessively demanding development conditions and a lengthy development cycle. To address this issue, we propose to use subgraph queries for SBSs (SQS), which is an efficient approach that allows system engineers to build SBSs based on previous development experience. The SQS converts the SBS engineering problem into a subgraph isomorphism problem and uses a customized algorithm inspired by the VF2 algorithm to build SBSs with quality constraints and optimization goals for system quality. The SQS offers a new paradigm for efficient SBS engineering that significantly reduces the time and effort required in the system-engineering process. We discuss a series of experiments that use two real-world Web service datasets to demonstrate the practicality, effectiveness, and efficiency of this approach.