Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Expert Systems With Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa

Review

QoS-aware cloud service composition: A systematic mapping study

from the perspective of computational intelligence
Qiping She, Xiaochao Wei∗, Guihua Nie, Donglin Chen
School of Economics, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Cloud service composition builds new value-added services by combining existing single services. How-
Received 26 January 2019 ever, because of the exuberant growth of cloud services and the varying quality of service (QoS), dis-
Revised 9 July 2019
covering required services and creating a service composition with certain quality guarantees becomes
Accepted 10 July 2019
a significant technical issue and attracts much concern. Computational intelligence techniques are con-
Available online 11 July 2019
sidered to be effective in solving such problems, and researchers have made substantial efforts in this
Keywords: area. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, there is not any systematic research about this issue
Computational intelligence techniques with a particular focus on computing intelligence. Thus, the current study aims to create a panoramic
Quality of service (QoS) view of QoS-aware cloud service composition from the perspective of computational intelligence. The ob-
Cloud service composition jectives of this paper are to (1) investigate the relevant studies on this field; (2) make a comprehensive
Systematic mapping study examination of the literature from different aspects: active researchers, research motivations, QoS param-
eters, algorithms, datasets, optimization strategies and could layers; (3) identify the areas which need
further research. For this, a search protocol has been well defined, and 105 articles from 2009 to 2018
were selected. This study classified these articles into three groups, including non-heuristic, heuristic and
meta-heuristic, and then examined the research works from several aspects. The results indicate that re-
ducing response time is the most important motivation for researchers, and meta-heuristic algorithms,
especially genetic algorithms, are the most widely used computational intelligence techniques. Besides,
the most widely used QoS attributes and datasets are also revealed. Additionally, the study points out
there are still some research challenges in this area, such as QoS evaluation in a dynamic environment
and inter-service correlations. In general, this study classified and compared the existing computational
intelligence techniques; analyzed the research status and identified future research directions. It can pro-
vide a basis for both researchers and practitioners who are interested in this area. More significantly, in
the field of expert and intelligent systems, this study can assist in the design and development of expert
and intelligent systems in enterprises, it can efficiently assist enterprises in business decisions and risk
reduction.
© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Khababa, 2016). Therefore, selecting the appropriate services and

In cloud environments, services are delivered to users accord-
ing to their requirements. As a single service may not neces-
sarily fulfill the user’s needs, existing services are combined to
create value-added composite services (Jatoth, Gangadharan, &
Buyya, 2017). However, with the proliferation of cloud comput-
ing, more providers provide cloud services with similar functional
but diverse non-functional (quality of service) features (Seghir &
∗
Corresponding author at: Building Jian 4#, Gongda Road, Hongshan District,
Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China
E-mail addresses: 524037171@qq.com (Q. She), weixiaochaowin@163.com (X.
Wei), neigh@whut.edu.cn (G. Nie), chendl@whut.edu.cn (D. Chen).
combine them to meet the users’ QoS expectation becomes a
key issue in computing service provisioning (Mistry, Bouguettaya,
Dong, & Qin, 2018), which is called QoS-aware cloud service com-
position (QoS-CSC) problem (Jula, Sundararajan, & Othman, 2014;
Tao, Zhao, Hu, & Zhou, 2009). Furthermore, with the development
of the new technologies (such as the internet of things, 5G Net-
works), a lot of resources can also be encapsulated into cloud ser-
vices, combinatorial optimization problems in many fields (such as
cloud manufacturing, intelligent transportation, mobile healthcare,
smart city, and so on) can be converted to the problem of QoS-CSC
(Khansari, Sharifian, & Motamedi, 2018; Lartigau, Xu, Nie, & Zhan,
2015; Li, He, Wang, & Zhang, 2018).
QoS-CSC is a combinatorial optimization problem and also
considered an NP-hard problem since more and more similar

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2019.07.021
0957-4174/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
2 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804
single services have emerged in cloud environments (Kurdi, Al-
Anazi, Campbell, & Faries, 2015; Qi, Dou, Zhang, & Chen, 2012).
Specifically, service composition may happen at different cloud
layers, such as IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform
as a service) and SaaS (software as a service) (Karim, Ding, &
Miri, 2013), and candidate services may be invocated from mul-
tiple cloud platforms, which makes the composition of services
in cloud environments more complicated than the combination of
web services. To address this issue, several techniques, including
framework-based mechanism, agent-based mechanism, and com-
putational intelligence techniques, have been developed by schol-
ars (Vakili & Navimipou, 2017). This study focuses on research
works on resolving QoS-CSC using computational intelligence tech-
niques.
Computational Intelligence (CI) is a sub-branch of artificial in-
telligence (AI) that focus on studying to promote intelligent be-
havior in complex, uncertain, and changing environments (Konar,
2005; Oliveira et al., 2018). It is considered to be effective in solv-
ing complex problems such as NP-hard. CI technique was first uti-
lized in QoS-CSC in 2009 (Kofler, Haq, & Schikuta, 2009). After that,
substantial efforts were made in this area, and different techniques
have been proposed to solve this issue, such as genetic algorithm
(Klein, Ishikawa, & Honiden, 2012) and particle swarm optimiza-
tion algorithm (Wang, Sun, Zou, & Yang, 2013).
Though computational intelligence technique has received
much concern in the field of QoS-aware cloud service composi-
tion, for all we know, there is no systematic research about this
issue that focused specifically on computing intelligence. As a con-
sequence, it becomes difficult and confusing to choose a suitable
computational intelligence technique because of the number of al-
gorithms described in the literature and the performance of each
technique are not investigated, researchers also find it hard to as-
sess research gaps and future research trends. Therefore, to give
an overview of the current research in this area and identify di-
rections for future studies, a systematic mapping was performed
based on 105 articles published between 2009 and 2018. The main
differences between the present paper and the other reviews are:
(1) the broad scope used to investigate this theme, as articles pub-
lished in a decade year have been investigated; (2) a wide range
of metrics are taken into account to compare and analyze the cur-
rent studies; (3) cover all of the QoS parameters and computational
intelligence techniques that included in relevant studies, whereas
other surveys usually only discuss the most commonly used ones.
The major contributions of this study are as follows:
• Making a comprehensive examination of the research works
from different aspects, including active researchers, research
motivations, QoS parameters, applied approaches, utilized
datasets, optimization strategies and cloud layers.
• Discovering the active researchers in this field, also exploring
the applied approaches, QoS parameters, and datasets which
are mostly used in recent works.
• Outlining the main challenges and crucial areas that needed
further research.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows:
Section 2 introduces the backgrounds and related works.
Section 3 describes the research method used for selecting
relevant articles. Section 4 provides a systematic analysis and
comparison of the selected studies. Section 5 presents the answers
to research questions and makes a further discusses on results.
Section 6 analyzes the study limitations. Section 7 concludes
this study and points out future works. The final section is the
references.
2. Backgrounds and related works
2.1. Backgrounds
This section describes the key concepts related to the two main
fields: QoS-aware cloud service composition and computational in-
telligence, which will provide a foundation for the rest of the
study.
2.1.1. QoS-aware cloud service composition
The problem of QoS-aware cloud service composition(QoS-CSC)
is to find suitable concrete services for each task and combine
these single services together, so that the composite service can
satisfy not only users’ requirements but also has the optimal global
QoS (Liu, Chu, Song, Xue, & Lu, 2016b). Fig. 1 indicates the concep-
tual model of QoS-aware cloud service composition, including two
main processes: service discovery and service composition (Seghir
& Khababa, 2016). In the discovery process, the complex require-
ments of users can be decomposed into serval tasks, and each
task can be performed by a set of concrete services with similar
functionality but different QoS. Therefore, how to evaluate the QoS
property of candidate services becomes a very interesting and vital
challenge. In the following, a brief description of composite mode,
QoS model and QoS aggregation for service composition will be
provided.
2.1.1.1. Composition mode. Services can be combined based on four
basic modes: sequential mode, loop mode, conditional mode, and
parallel mode, as is shown in Fig. 2. However, most articles only
study the service combination in sequential mode, other compo-
sition modes are considered to be converted to sequential mode
through some strategies (Cardoso, Sheth, Miller, Arnold, & Kochut,
2004; Ramírez, Parejo, Romero, Segura, & Ruiz-Cortés, 2017).
2.1.1.2. QoS model. It is a model of uncertainty transition between
qualitative concept and its quantitative representation (Wang,
Zheng, Sun, & Zou, 2011). Current discussions on QoS model mainly
concern QoS attributes for component services and composite ser-
vices, it refers to the non-functional feature of services and usu-
ally be defined as a set of parameters, such as response time, cost,
availability, etc. QoS model can be used to differentiate composi-
tion plans during service provision, and the relevant requirements
are usually defined in service level agreement (SLA) (Ye, Mistry,
Bouguettaya, & Dong, 2016; Zhao, Sakr, Liu, & Bouguettaya, 2014).
2.1.1.3. QoS aggregation. QoS aggregation techniques are used to
compute the merged QoS value for composite service. There are
five aggregation operations for developing an aggregation formula,
including summation, average, multiplication, min and max. For
each QoS attribute, the utilization of aggregation operations is de-
pendent on the composite mode and the characteristic of the cor-
responding QoS parameter. The specific QoS aggregation formula
will be provided in Section 5.
2.1.2. Computational intelligence
Computational intelligence (CI) was first proposed in
Bezdek (1998). Till date, there is still no uniform definition for
computational intelligence yet. For example, Engelbrecht defined
CI as the study of adaptive mechanisms to facilitate intelligent be-
havior in complex and changing environments (Engelbrecht, 2007).
Siddique and Adeli defined the computational intelligent system as
a system which deals with low-level data such as numerical data,
has a pattern recognition component and does not use knowledge
in the artificial intelligence (AI) sense (Siddique & Adeli, 2013).
Although there is not yet full agreement on what computational
intelligence exactly is, there are widely accepted views on the
 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804 3

Fig. 1. QoS-aware cloud service composition process.

Fig. 2. Composition modes.

characteristics of CI, including calculating adaptability, fault tol-
erance, and error rate close to human performance (Siddique &
Adeli, 2013). This makes CI techniques are efficient in solving com-
plex problems that traditional techniques did not work effectively
because of uncertain environments and dynamical data (Oliveira
et al., 2018). At present, CI has been widely used in multiple fields,
such as network security (Wu & Banzhaf, 2010), intelligent trans-
portation (Zhao, Zheng, & Liu, 2018; Araghi, Khosravi, & Creighton,
2015), financial market (Cavalcante, Brasileiro, Souza, Nobrega, &
Oliveira, 2016) and cancer prediction (Cosma, Brown, Archer, Khan,
& Graham Pockley, 2017).
The most used but not limited to CI techniques are artificial
neural networks, metaheuristics and fuzzy systems (Kruse, Borgelt,
Braune, Mostaghim, & Steinbrecher, 2016). Moreover, some exact
algorithms, such as integer programming and linear programming,
are also considered as CI techniques in recent years (Jatoth et al.,
2017). In the following, the CI techniques used for QoS-aware cloud
service composition will be briefly summarized. Because heuristic
techniques have a long history of use in combinational problem
(Reeves, 1993), it is considered reasonable to categorize the survey
into three groups (Jatoth et al., 2017), including non-heuristic algo-
rithms, heuristic algorithms and meta-heuristic algorithms, which
helps to highlight the comparison of methods.
4 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804
2.1.2.1. Non-heuristic (exact) algorithm. It is usually used to find an
optimal solution set for optimization problems. Generally speak-
ing, every optimization problem can obtain a unique optimum so-
lution using an exhaustive search, but it usually needs to take a
considerable amount of time to find the optimum solution. Thus,
it is vital to decrease the time complexity, and some techniques
have been developed to get fast exact algorithms for NP-hard prob-
lems, including pruning the search tree, improved data processing
method, local search, and dynamic programming across the subsets
(Woeginger, 2003). Some of the widely used non-heuristic (exact)
algorithms are branch and bound algorithm, linear programming,
and integer programming.
2.1.2.2. Heuristic algorithm. A heuristic algorithm is usually de-
signed for the specific problem and created by “experience”, it
aims to make full use of special characteristics of the problem to
get a high-quality feasible solution in a reasonable computational
time (Reeves, 1993). This solution cannot be guaranteed to be the
best one, but it can be considered a shortcut if time is the major
constraint (Yang, 2009). Some of the widely used heuristic algo-
rithms includes A∗ algorithm and hill-climbing algorithm.
2.1.2.3. Meta-heuristic algorithm. Meta-heuristic is a high-level
strategy for exploring search spaces by using different methods
(Blum & Roli, 2001). Here, “Meta” means “beyond”, hence, meta-
heuristic algorithms are often designed to address complex opti-
mization problems using higher-level strategies, unlike heuristic al-
gorithms, meta-heuristic algorithms are problem independent and
suitable for broad issues (Bianchi, Dorigo, Gambardella, & Gutjahr,
2009). The classes of meta-heuristic algorithms include, but are not
restricted to, genetic algorithm (GA), imperialist competitive algo-
rithm (ICA) and social learning optimization (SLO).
2.2. Related works
Some review papers about cloud service composition have been
published. This section would analyze the existing review articles
and outline their main strengths and weaknesses.
Jula et al. have made a systematic review of cloud service
composition based on 34 articles published from 2009 to 2013
(Jula et al., 2014). This review investigated the existing methods
and classified them into five groups, including classic and graph-
based algorithms, combinatorial algorithms, machine-based meth-
ods, structures methods and frameworks methods. This review also
examined the QoS parameters included in the literature and re-
vealed their percentages. However, article selection approach, open
issues and papers published after 2013 were not contained.
Asghari and Navimipour surveyed the meta-heuristic algorithms
used in cloud service composition (Asghari & Navimipour, 2015).
This review divided the relevant articles into two categories: sin-
gle and multiple clouds and analyzed the performance of each al-
gorithm in terms of time and cost. However, the article selection
mechanism, QoS parameters and open issues are not taken into ac-
count, and papers published after 2015 were not contained.
Moreover, Asghari and Navimipour have investigated the service
composition approaches in multi-cloud environments (Asghari &
Navimipour, 2016), such as all clouds, base cloud, a smart cloud,
COM2 and clustering algorithms. However, the article selection ap-
proach has not been taken into consideration; also, QoS parameters
were not included.
A further study on cloud service composition has been pre-
sented in Vakili and Navimipou (2017). In their survey, service
composition methods were classified into three categories, includ-
ing agent-based methods, framework-based methods, and heuris-
tic methods. They conducted a comprehensive analysis of existing
research, including their advantages and disadvantages. However,
only five QoS parameters: efficiency, optimization, time, scalability
and cost have been considered.
A review on QoS-aware cloud service selection and composition
has been proposed in Hayyolalam and Pourhaji Kazem (2018), in
their research, articles were classified into two categories based on
application environments: single and multi-cloud environment, the
methods presented in the articles were analyzed and compared in
detail, however, articles published before 2013 and newly articles
published after August 2017 were not included.
In general, the existing review articles have made a discussion
on cloud service composition and provided great help for our re-
search, but there still have some weakness as follows:
(1) The existing review articles only analyze articles within five
years; some new papers, especially those published in 2018
were not included.
(2) Only a few QoS parameters were investigated in some pa-
pers. Besides, the QoS aggregation techniques for different
composition modes have been neglected.
(3) Some key information has not been investigated, e.g., active
researchers in this field, the most important research moti-
vations, and cloud computing layers.
3. Research methodology
This systematic mapping is conducted according to the guide-
lines provided in Petersen, Vakkalanka, and Kuzniarz (2015) and
Kitchenham and Charters (2007), which aims to provide a
panorama view of QoS-aware cloud service composition with a
special concentration on computational intelligence. Fig. 3 illus-
trated the systematic mapping process, and the main stages of this
mapping process are presented below.
3.1. Need identification
Identification of the need for mapping study is the initial step
when planning the mapping. This study first searches for the rel-
evant review articles. The search work was performed strictly ac-
cording to the search protocol proposed below. The difference is
that the article type is limited to the review article, and finally, five
review articles about the cloud service composition were found.
A detailed analysis of these articles is in Section 2.2. We can find
that the existing articles have made a discussion on cloud service
composition. However, there is no recent systematic research on
QoS-aware cloud service composition that emphasizes computing
intelligence. As a consequence, it is challenging to assess research
status and identify future research directions in this filed. There-
fore, the current study is intended to fill in this gap by identifying
the literature that solving QoS-aware cloud service composition us-
ing computational intelligence techniques with the period of 2009
to 2018. This mapping study can provide a solid basis for both re-
searchers and practitioners who are interested in this area.
3.2. Research questions
The main purpose of this mapping study is to provide an
overview of the study that solving QoS-aware cloud service com-
position problems with computational intelligence techniques. This
leads to the following research questions (RQs):
(1) RQ1: What are the research motivations of the researchers?
(2) RQ2: Are there any active researchers in the field of CI-based
QoS-CSC?
(3) RQ3: What are the QoS parameters and QoS aggregation
techniques used in CI based QoS-CSC?
(4) RQ4: What are the current computational intelligence tech-
niques that support QoS-CSC, and which datasets are used
for method testing and validation?
 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804 5

Fig. 3. Systematic mapping process.

(5) RQ5: What optimization strategies are adopted in research

works? Optimization strategies of the current research are
analyzed from three aspects: optimization mode, multi-
objective optimization strategy and QoS constraints strategy.
(6) RQ6: Which cloud layers are involved in the service compo-
sition process?
(7) RQ7: What are the future research directions in the field of
QoS-CSC?
In order to answer these RQs, in the following, all the main
components of the search protocol will be discussed: search strat-
egy, study selection, quality assessment, data extraction and valid-
ity threats.

3.3. Search strategy

To identify the maximum number of relevant primary studies,

we defined a search strategy from three perspectives: data sources,
search scope and search strings.
In terms of data sources, the most commonly used electronic
databases recommended in Abdelmaboud, Jawawi, Ghani, Elsafi,
and Kitchenham (2015), Kitchenham et al. (2010), Zhang, Babar,
and Tell (2011) were identified as sources to find articles:
• Google scholar (https://scholar.google.com/)
• SpringerLink (http://link.springer.com/)
• IEEE explorer (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/) Fig. 4. Article selection process.
• ACM Digital Library (https://dl.acm.org/)
• Science Direct (http://www.sciencedirect.com/)
• Outcome: The outcome of the literature is a composite service
With regards to search scope, based on guidelines provided in that requires less cost and less response time. Therefore, the
Petersen, Vakkalanka, and Kuzniarz (2015), we limit our search to major item of the outcome may come down to the quality of
peer-reviewed publications, including journals, and conference pa- service (QoS).
pers. Besides, the search results are limited to the publication pe-
riod between 2009 and 2018. We chose this start date because Secondly, we used synonyms and alternate spellings of search
computational intelligence technique was first utilized in the study terms to identify as broad as articles we could find. The search
of QoS-aware cloud service composition in 2009. strings used for each database and the number of search results
About search strings, aim to specify search strings from re- can be found in Table 1. It should be noted that the initial search
search questions, PICO (population, intervention, comparison, out- was conducted in 2017, and a supplement was made in 2018 to
come) model suggested in Kitchenham and Charters (2007) was ensure that none of the articles published between 2009 and 2018
proposed to identify and combine keywords. were ignored.
Firstly, the major keywords were derived and listed below. Then EndNote X7 was used to remove duplicates, and this work
was done by two master students under the supervision of the
• Population: In this study, the population may refer to the cloud,
teachers.
cloud service, cloud computing and cloud environment.
• Intervention: Here, intervention refers to a computational in-
telligence technique used for service composition. There are no 3.4. Study selection and quality assessment
specific interventions available for investigation.
• Comparison: In this study, we compare a huge number of tech- This section aims to select the primary studies from the articles
niques included in the literature, there is not a clear compari- retrieved by the search engine. the article selection process of this
son to be investigated. study is demonstrated in Fig. 4.
6 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804

Table 1
Searches in databases.

Database Search strings Results

Google ((“quality of service” OR “QoS” OR “QoS-aware”) AND (“Cloud service” OR “Cloud computing” OR “Cloud environment”) AND (“service 8980
Scholar integration” OR “service composition” OR “service combination”))
((“quality of service” OR “QoS” OR “QoS-aware”) AND (“Cloud service” OR “Cloud computing” OR “Cloud environment”) AND (“resource 285
integration” OR “resource composition” OR “resource combination”))
Springer (Cloud AND QoS AND (“quality of service” OR “QoS-aware”) AND (“Cloud service” OR “Cloud computing” OR “Cloud environment”) 2102
AND (“service composition” OR“service combination” OR “service integration” OR “resource composition” OR“resource integration”
OR “resource combination”))
IEEE ((“quality of service” OR “QoS” OR “QoS-aware”) AND (“Cloud service” OR “Cloud computing” OR “Cloud environment”) AND (“service 768
composition” OR“service combination” OR “service integration” OR “resource composition” OR“resource integration” OR “resource
combination”))
ACM "query": {content.ftsec:(+cloud +QoS “quality of service” “QoS” “QoS-aware” "service integration" "service composition” “service 1002
combination”" "resource integration" "resource composition”“resource combination”) AND (+"cloud computing")
Science ((“quality of service” OR “QoS” OR “QoS-aware”) AND (“Cloud service” OR “Cloud computing” OR “Cloud environment”) AND (“service 464
Direct composition” OR“service combination” OR “service integration”))
((“quality of service” OR “QoS” OR “QoS-aware”) AND (“Cloud service” OR “Cloud computing” OR “Cloud environment”) AND (“resource 36
composition” OR“resource combination” OR “resource integration”))

3.4.1. Study selection • QA4: Does this article have some meaningful research findings
The main phases of the article selection process include quick that can guide future research?
screening, full-text checking, and reference snowballing.
Then, the answer to each question was assigned a numerical
3.4.1.1. Phase 1: quick screening. In this phase, the titles, keywords score, 0 (“no”), 0.5 (“to some extent”), or 1 (“yes”). Co-authors were
and abstracts of the retrieved articles were examined based on the divided into two groups to assess the selected primary studies re-
inclusion and exclusion criteria, which are described as follows. spectively, and the median value was taken to represent the con-
sensus view (Kitchenham et al., 2010).
Inclusion criteria Finally, all authors set a threshold of 3 to include any study
with a score of 3 or above. However, no article was excluded, thus,
• Studies that are written in English.
this mapping involved all the selected 105 studies.
• Studies that are published in international conferences or jour-
nals.
• Studies that focus on solving the QoS-aware cloud service com- 3.5. Data extraction
position problem using computational intelligence techniques.
In order to answer the previously defined research questions,
Exclusion criteria the following data were extracted when reviewing the primary
studies: (1) name of the article; (2) article type; (3) publication
• Studies that are not accessible in full-text. year; (4) name of publication venue; (5) names and affiliations of
• Studies that are not peer-reviewed articles. the authors; (6) research objectives; (7) QoS parameters included
• Studies that do not take QoS into consideration. in the study; (8) applied techniques; (9) some metrics for in-
• Studies that do not explain the proposed method in detail. vestigated researches (utilized datasets, optimization mode, multi-
• Studies that do not identify the research objective clearly. objective optimization strategy, QoS constraint strategy and cloud
layers). Section 4 provides a comprehensive investigation and de-
3.4.1.2. Phase 2: full-text checking. In this phase, to make further scription of these 9 aspects by observing the investigated papers.
selections, the full text of the preliminarily selected publications To further improve the accuracy of the extracted data, the data ex-
was read completely to determine their relevance to the study. In traction work was done by the second author and then checked by
particular, those articles hard to make decisions were discussed at the first author.
team meetings.

3.4.1.3. Phase 3: reference snowballing. In order to find as many rel-
evant articles as possible, the remaining articles from the previous
phase were used to conduct backward snowballing (Wohlin, 2014),
which led to 4 studies were added. Finally, a total of 105 articles
are included for this mapping.
3.4.2. Quality assessment
It is often difficult to distinguish the rigor and the effectiveness
of the research methods presented in the literature. For additional
examination, firstly, four questions were raised as quality assess-
ment criteria to provide a quality assessment of the 105 selected
papers.
• QA1: Is there a clear statement to show the differences be-
tween the current study and related works?
• QA2: Does the study provide sufficient data to verify the valid-
ity of the research method?
• QA3: Does the study compare the proposed method and the
existing baseline methods?
3.6. Validity threats
Concerning the validity threats discussed in
Petersen et al. (2015), the most significant validity threats as-
sociated with this study are selection bias and inaccurate data
extraction.
Selection bias refers that an article may be incorrectly in-
cluded or excluded. This threat is primarily related to the effective-
ness of the search strategy, as we chose Google Scholar, Springer,
IEEE, ACM and Science Direct as data sources to find articles. This
choice was done according to the suggestions in related reviews
(Hayyolalam & Pourhaji Kazem, 2018; Vakili & Navimipou, 2017),
which led to some repeated papers have been selected because
Google Scholar is a kind of aggregation service, to address this is-
sue, we used EndNote X7 to remove duplicates and manage liter-
ature. Additionally, this threat is also related to the study selec-
tion process because each researcher’s understanding of inclusion
and exclusion criteria is different. Articles selected by different re-
searchers are likely to be different. To minimize bias and improve
 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804 7

Table 2
Non-heuristic (exact) algorithms for QoS-CSC.

Publisher Reference Optimization Multi-objective Algorithm Dataset QoS constraints Cloud layers
mode optimization

IEEE (Kofler et al., 2009) Global s Parallel branch and bound RG s SaaS
algorithm
(Wang et al., 2011) Global n-s Mixed integer WS-DREAM, RG s SaaS
programming
(Hossain et al., Global n-s Linear programming n-m s IaaS
2012)
(Bao & Dou, 2012) Global n-s Improved tree-pruning Generated by s SaaS
based algorithm computer
computation
(Cui et al., 2012) Global n-s Viterbi algorithm n-m s SaaS
(Li et al., 2013) Global n-s Voting algorithm RG n-m IaaS
(Karim et al., 2013) Global n-s Analytic hierarchy process RG s IaaS,
SaaS
(Dou et al., 2015) Global n-s History record-based RG n-m SaaS
service optimization
method
(Ye et al., 2016) Global n-s Time series group SG n-m IaaS,
similarity approach SaaS
(Zhang et al., Local+Global n-s Block-elimination-based QWS, RG s SaaS
2016) mapreduce method
(Wang et al., 2016) Global s Mixed integer Datasets (Al-Masri & s IaaS
programming Mahmoud, 2007;
Zheng, Zhang, & Lyu,
2010; Zhang, Zheng,
& Lyu, 2011)
(Chen et al., 2016) Local+ s Vector ordinal WS-Dream, QWS, RG s SaaS
Global optimization
(Bharathan et al., Global n-s Integer linear QWS s SaaS
2017) programming
(Wang et al., 2018) Global s 0-1 linear programming Datasets (Al-Masri & s IaaS
Mahmoud, 2007;
Zheng et al., 2010),
Elsevier (Qi et al., 2012) Local n-s Mixed integer RG s SaaS
programming
(Huang et al., Global n-s Dijkstra algorithm, RG s IaaS
2014a) κ -shortest pathalgorit
(Gabrel et al., Global s Directed graph structure WSC-09, WSR-QoS n-s SaaS
2017)
(Zhu et al., 2018) Global n-s GraphPlan and fuzzy logic WS-Challenge.Testset n-s SssS
Generator 2009
Springer (Badidi et al., Global s TOPSIS RG s SaaS
2018)
ACM (Alrifai et al., Global n-s Mixed integer QWS, SG s SaaS
2010) programming
(Ye et al., 2014) Global n-s Decision analysis approach RG s IaaS,
SaaS
SERSC (Lu et al., 2014) Global n-s Hypothesis test QWS, Simulated s SaaS
KSII (Wang et al., Global n-s Branch-and-bound method RG s SaaS
2015b)
s: supported, n-s: not supported, n-m: not mentioned, RG: Randomly generated dataset, SG: Synthetically generated dataset.

reliability, two researchers worked together in this work. More-
over, the selection process was carried out in multiple steps (quick
screening, full-text checking and reference snowballing) to reduce
misinterpretations to a minimum.
Inaccurate data extraction refers that the data may be extracted
by different researchers in different ways. In other words, sub-
jective behavior in the data extraction process may lead to in-
accurate extraction results. To mitigate this risk, the data extrac-
tion was done by the second author, and then the first author
checked the correctness by tracing the extracted information back
into the statements in each paper, In general, letting another au-
thor check the extraction is a common practice in the systematic
study (Petersen et al., 2015).
4. Classification and approaches in QoS-CSC
In this section, current computational intelligence techniques
used in QoS-CSC are divided into three categories, including
non-heuristic (exact) algorithms, heuristic algorithms and meta-
heuristic algorithms. In Section 4.1–4.3, 105 selected articles that
belong to these categories have been summarized, and the metrics
for current researches are provided as well.
4.1. Non-heuristic (exact) algorithms
There are 23 articles belong to the non-heuristic. In the fol-
lowing, a brief description of the current non-heuristic (exact) al-
gorithms will be provided, and their metrics will be shown in
Table 2.
In Kofler et al. (2009) the composition of work-flows has been
converted to a multi-dimensional multi-choice knapsack problem,
and a parallelizable branch and bound algorithm is developed to
achieve the optimal happiness measure. Also, in Hossain, Hassan,
Qurishi, and Alghamdi (2012) the VM (virtual machine) resource
allocation and composition problem has been converted to a multi-
dimensional bin-packing problem, and this problem is addressed
by using linear programming, in addition, a heuristic approach has
been proposed and proved to have similar performance.
8 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804
In Wang et al. (2011) the uncertainty characteristics in cloud
environments has been paid attention, a cloud model is developed
to identify the uncertainty of the QoS, and mixed integer program-
ming is applied to obtain the optimal service set. Moreover, consid-
ering the candidate services may be invocated from different cloud
platforms, a local optimization enumeration method has been pro-
posed in Qi et al. (2012) to obtain the QoS qualified composite ser-
vice.
The correlations among multiple services have also been taken
into account, in Bao and Dou (2012) a service composition method
has been proposed by using finite state machine (FSM), this
method consists of two phases, firstly, the composition tree is con-
structed based on tree-pruning-based algorithm, and then a sim-
ple additive weighting (SAW) technique is adopted to identify the
optimal service set. In Chen, Huang, Lin, and Shen (2016) QoS
dependency has been introduced and vector ordinal optimization
techniques are utilized to address this multi-objective composi-
tion optimization problem. In Bharathan, Rajendran, and Sundar-
raj (2017) a penalty-based approach has been developed for ser-
vice composition in geodistributed cloud environments, in this ap-
proach, violations in QoS constraints are allowed but with an asso-
ciated penalty.
Authors in Ye, Bouguettaya, and Zhou (2014) have put forward a
novel cross-layers (SaaS and IaaS layers) composition approach, in
this approach, a Bayesian network-based method is adopted to rep-
resent consumers’ preferences in their economic model, and an in-
fluence diagram is utilized to resolve the combination optimization
problem. Thereafter, researchers in Ye et al. (2016) make a long-
term QoS prediction according to short-term QoS advertisements
and QoS history records; then the time series similarity measure
is performed between consumer requirements and the predicted
QoS values to obtain the suitable solution. Moreover, researchers
in Karim et al. (2013) have also presented a two-phase approach,
firstly, consumer’s QoS constraints are mapped to SaaS layer, then
SaaS layer is allowed to choose the optimal IaaS service under
these QoS requirements.
Skyline selection method has been used by some researches
to reduce the time consumption for service composition. In
Alrifai, Skoutas, and Risse (2010) the skyline services are identi-
fied based on the QoS values, and then an approach is developed
to efficiently select and composite services by pruning non-skyline
ones. Also, researches in Zhang, Kai, Khan, and Malluhi (2016) have
proposed an integrated skyline query processing approach to select
qualified candidate services and combine them. Moreover, authors
in Li, Wu, and Lu (2013) have adopted a shortest-path based vot-
ing algorithm to discover the optimum solution, which also signif-
icantly reduced the response time.
Besides, reliability, accuracy, trustworthiness and privacy assur-
ance have also been paid attention, authors in Lu, Hu, Wang, and
Li (2014) have proposed a dynamic cloud service combination ap-
proach based on objective QoS (reliability, availability and execu-
tion time) and stochasticity and subjective trust evaluation. Fur-
thermore, a privacy-aware service composition method in multi-
cloud environments has been provided in Dou, Zhang, Liu, and
Chen (2015), in this research, service evaluation is performed based
on QoS history records, not the QoS values published from the
provider, and the k-means algorithm is adopted to filter represen-
tative history records, it greatly reduces the response time and im-
proves the privacy assurance for not transaction records are all re-
quired to unveil.
Considering the network resource consumption in the cloud en-
vironment, a network–cloud service selection problem is formu-
lated as a variant of multi-constrained optimal path problem in
Huang, Liu, and Duan (2014a), and an exact algorithm is proposed
to solve this issue. In Wang, Yang, and Mi (2015b) the network QoS
and service QoS are taken into consideration separately, and an ap-
proach based on branch-and-bound method has been proposed to
identify the optimal composition path and satisfy various QoS re-
strictions. Authors in Wang, Zhou, Yang, and Chang (2016) have put
forward a network-aware service composition method to cut down
network resource consumption and optimize the QoS of composite
services. Furthermore, researchers in Wang, Zhou, and Bao (2018)
considered the trade-off among network resource consumption,
energy consumption and QoS performance, they handled the QoS-
CSC problem as a multi-objective optimization problem, and the
optimum solution (such as, high QoS utility, low network resource
consumption, and low energy consumption) has been discovered
by means of 0–1 linear programming.
Concerning users’ preferences, as well as the context infor-
mation, a conceptual framework designed to deliver personal-
ized services has been proposed in Badidi, Atif, Sheng, and Mah-
eswaran (2018), a TOPSIS (technique for order performance by sim-
ilarity to ideal solution) algorithm is adopted to select the appro-
priate services under users’ QoS constraints and current context.
In Zhu, Fang, Li, and Kuang (2018), GraphPlan and fuzzy logic are
utilized together to solve the problem of QoS-CSC, fuzzy rules are
developed to rank services based on user preferences, which helps
reduce the searching space. In Cui, Li, and Zheng (2012) several as-
pects of QoS are taken into account, including QoS attributes, user
preference and the service relationships, and a service composition
method based Viterbi algorithm has been proposed to reason out
the global optimal solution.
Authors in Gabrel, Manouvrier, Moreau, and Murat (2017) fo-
cus on automatic syntactic service composition, in their study, ex-
ecution time and throughput criteria have been considered, service
composition process is formulated as a scheduling problem under
AND/OR constraints, and a new directed-graph-structure-based al-
gorithm has been presented to achieve the optimum results.
4.2. Heuristic algorithms
There are 20 articles belong to the heuristic. The classification
of current heuristic algorithms will be discussed in the following,
and their metrics will be presented in Table 3.
In Wu and Khoury (2012) researchers have presented a multi-
objective approach based on tree-based search algorithm to op-
timize various QoS parameters in cloud service composition.
In Huang, Liu, Yu, Duan, and Tanaka (2013) a system model
is developed to characterize service provisioning behavior in
virtualization-based cloud computing, then a novel approximation
algorithm and a variant of a well-known QoS routing procedure are
utilized to resolve the QoS-aware service composition problem.
To adaptively evaluate and composite services in cloud envi-
ronments, an adaptive method has been designed in Yang, Lin,
and Dou (2013) for dynamic service evaluation and composition.
In Tao, LaiLi, Xu, and Zhang (2013) researchers have proposed a
parallel intelligent method based on adaptive chaos optimization
with reflex migration to address the issue of cloud manufacturing
service composition optimal-selection. Thereafter, in Huang, Li, and
Tao (2014) a new chaos control operator algorithm has been devel-
oped to adaptively find Pareto-optimal solution for service compo-
sition in cloud manufacturing. Furthermore, in Wang, Wang, Hu,
Zhang, and Gu (2016) a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning
method has been proposed to adaptively achieve the optimal solu-
tion for the large scale service composition process.
For trustworthy service selection and composition, in Hang and
Singh (2011) a trustworthy service composition method have been
proposed based on Bayesian networks, and a beta-mixture model
is utilized to express the trust distribution for each composition. In
Li, Zheng, Chen, Song, and Chen (2014) a novel heuristic approach
has been presented for trustworthy service composition. This ap-
proach includes three stages. Firstly, a local selection approach is
 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804 9

Table 3
Heuristic algorithms for QoS-CSC

Publisher Author Optimization Multi- Algorithm Dataset QoS Cloud layer

mode objective constraints
optimization

IEEE (Wu & Khoury, 2012) Global s Tree-based search n-m s SaaS
algorithm
(Yu & Bouguettaya, 2013) Local s Bottom-up algorithm SG s SaaS
(Tao et al., 2013) Global s Adaptive chaos n-m s IaaS,
optimization algorithm SaaS
(Huang et al., 2014b) Global n-s Approximation algorithm RG s IaaS
(Neiat et al., 2014) Global n-s A∗ algorithm SG n-s IaaS
(Mostafa & Zhang, 2015) Global s Reinforcement learning RG s SaaS
(Deng et al., 2016a) Global n-s Pruning method RG n-s SaaS
(Wu et al., 2017) Global n-s Top-k iteration RG s IaaS
composition process
(Kurdi et al., 2018) Global n-s MultiCuckoo algorithm OWL-S XPlan s SaaS
(Huang et al., 2018) Global n-s Approximation algorithm RG s IaaS
Elsevier (Li et al., 2014) Global n-s Trust-based heuristic QWS, RG s SaaS
algorithm
(Pourhaji Kazem, Pedram, & Global n-s Bayesian network QWS s SaaS
Abolhassani, 2015)
(Wang, Wang, Hu et al., 2016) Global n-s Multi-agent reinforcement Simulated s SaaS
learning
Springer (Ghobaei-Arani et al., 2018) Global n-s Cuckoo search algorithm Simulated s SaaS
ACM (Hang & Singh, 2011) Global n-s Bayesian network Simulated n-s SaaS
Taylor & Francis (Huang et al., 2014) Local n-s Chaos control optimal n-m s IaaS,
algorithm SaaS
Sersc (Xiao & Liu, 2014) Global n-s Evolution strategy Developed s SaaS
Inass (Bhushan & Ch, 2016) n-m n-s Heuristic-based on OWLS-Xplan s SaaS
PROMETHEE
ICICE (Huang et al., 2013) Global n-s Approximation algorithm RG s IaaS
Wiley (Yang et al., 2013) Global n-s Markov decision process RG n-s IaaS

s: supported, n-s: not supported, n-m: not mentioned, RG: Randomly generated dataset, SG: Synthetically generated dataset.

utilized to choose trustworthy candidates. Secondly, convex hulls
are created to decrease the service search time, at last, a heuris-
tic algorithm is adopted to combine services. Moreover, in Wu,
Dou, Hu, and Chen (2017) an improved top-k iteration process is
performed for trusted service combination in multi-cloud environ-
ments based on the user’s real-time demands.
Considering the importance of the network to cloud comput-
ing, authors in Huang, Liu, Duan, and Yan (2014b) have expressed
the network–cloud convergence problem as a variant of multi-
constrained optimal path problem, and an approximation algo-
rithm is developed to address this issue. Furthermore, in Huang,
Duan, Guo, Yan, and Yu (2018) a service composition model is pro-
posed to converge network resources and cloud services, in this
model, multiple QoS attributes have been taken into consideration
and end-to-end service performance is guaranteed.
In consideration of QoS correlations between cloud services,
authors in Deng, Wu, Hu, and Zhao (2016a) have developed
a novel correlation-aware service pruning approach to select
and composite the qualified candidate services. In addition, in
Pourhaji Kazem, Pedram, and Abolhassani (2015) a Bayesian net-
work based probabilistic QoS Model has been designed for grid
service composition, both the uncertainty of grid services and
the dependency among QoS values are taken into account. In
Xiao and Liu (2014) an evolution strategy has been utilized to
address the service composition problem with QoS constraints in
dynamical cloud environments. And a multi-objective approach
based on reinforcement learning has been proposed in Mostafa and
Zhang (2015) to solve the problem of dynamic service composition
with conflicting objectives and specifical QoS constraints.
To reduce the time complexity, in Yu & Bouguettaya (2013) the
dominance relationship between service providers is defined as
a composite service skyline, and a new bottom-up algorithm is
developed to reduce searching space significantly and obtain the
composite service skyline. In Bhushan and Ch (2016) an algorithm
based on PROMETHEE has been introduced for composing best
QoS-aware services with the minimum number of cloud combina-
tions, this approach achieved a significant improvement in com-
position time by processing a minimum number of services than
other benchmarks.
Specifically, authors in Kurdi, Ezzat, Altoaimy, Ahmed, and
Youcef-Toumi (2018) and Ghobaei-Arani, Rahmanian, Aslanpour,
and Dashti (2018) have presented a cuckoo-inspired algorithm to
combine IoT (Internet of Things) services and web services in
multi-cloud environments. Additionally, a novel heuristic approach
based on A∗ algorithm is proposed in Neiat, Bouguettaya, Sellis,
and Ye (2014) to select and composite spatiotemporal sensor-cloud
services, and two new QoS parameters, freshness and certainty, are
introduced.
4.3. Meta-heuristic algorithms
There are 62 articles belong to the meta-heuristic. In the fol-
lowing, we will provide a summary of the current meta-heuristic
algorithms, and more metrics about the current classification will
be described in Table 4.
One of the requirements of QoS-CSC is that it ought to be
carried out in real time, in line with this purpose, authors in
Wang et al. (2013) have utilized an improved particle swarm al-
gorithm to select services that satisfy specific QoS requirements,
the proposed approach employs a skyline operator to filter su-
perfluous candidates, which reduces the time cost. Moreover, re-
searchers in Huo, Zhuang, Gu, Ni, and Xue (2015) have proposed
a discrete gbest-guided artificial bee colony algorithm to reduce
the time complexity. In this approach, QoS variation is considered,
and a time attenuation function is proposed to make the QoS value
more in line with the current service performance.
To simultaneously optimize the execution cost and response
time, in Jula, Othman, and Sundararajan (2013) a new memetic
10 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804

Table 4
Meta-heuristic algorithms for QoS-CSC

Publisher Author Optimization Multi-objective Algorithm Dataset QoS Cloud Layer

mode optimization constraints

IEEE (Ludwig, 2012) Global n-s Improved genetic RG n-s SaaS

algorithm
(Jula et al., 2013) Global s Hybrid imperialist WS-DREAM, n-m SaaS
competitive-gravitational RG
attraction search
algorithm
(Dastjerdi & Global s Multi-objective SG s IaaS,
Buyya, 2014) evolutionary algorithm SaaS
(Klein et al., 2014) Global n-s Self-adaptive genetic PlanetLab s SaaS
algorithm Trace Dataset
(Zhang et al., 2015) Local+Global n-s Parallel ant colony TSPLIB n-m n-m
optimization algorithm
(Liu et al., 2015) Global n-s Genetic algorithm, RG s SaaS
simulated annealing and
tabu search
(Wang et al., 2015) Global n-s Genetic algorithm, RG s SaaS
simulated annealing
(Feng & Kong, 2015) Global s Fuzzy multi-objective RG n-s n-m
genetic algorithm
(Zhang et al., 2015) Global n-s Genetic algorithm QWS,RG s SaaS
(Deng et al., 2016b) Global n-s Teaching-learning-based RG n-s SaaS
optimization algorithm
(Deng et al., 2016d) Global n-s Genetic algorithm RG n-s SaaS, PaaS
(Deng et al., 2016c) Global n-s Differential evolution RG s SaaS,
(Wang et al., 2016) Global s Quantum genetic QWS n-s SaaS
algorithm
(Mistry et al., 2018) Global n-s Hybrid genetic algorithm SG s IaaS
(Khanam et al., 2018) Global n-s Particle swarm QWS s SaaS
optimization
(Li et al., 2018) Global n-s Empirical RG s IaaS
knowledge-oriented
genetic algorithm
(Kumar, Bahsoon, & Global s Multi-objective Dataset (Zheng, s SaaS
Chen, 2018) evolutionary algorithm Zhang, &
Lyu, 2014)
Elsevier (Wu & Zhu, 2013) Global n-s Ant colony optimization RG s SaaS
(Zhao et al., 2014) Local+Global n-s Negative selection immune RG s SaaS
algorithm
(Jula et al., 2015) Global n-s Imperialist competitive WS- n-m SaaS
algorithm DREAM,QoS
Dataset2
(Wang et al., 2015a) Global n-s Genetic algorithm RG s SaaS
(Yu et al., 2015) Local n-s Ant colony optimization OWL-S XPlan s SaaS
package
(Xin Zhao et al., 2015) Global s Evolutionary algorithm RG,SG s SaaS
(Wang et al., 2015) Global s An ant colony algorithm SG s SaaS

(Jrad et al., 2015) Global n-s Hybrid utility-based Simulated s IaaS

genetic algorithm
(Jian et al., 2016) Global s Improved genetic QWS,WS- s SaaS
algorithm DREAM
(Liu et al., 2016a) Local+Global s Culture genetic algorithm RG s SaaS
(Liu et al., 2016b) Global n-s Special social learning RG s SaaS
optimization algorithm
(Spezzano, 2016) Global s Multi-objective particle QWS s SaaS
swarm optimization
algorithm
(Chen et al., 2016) Global s Evolutionary algorithm SG s SaaS
(Xu et al., 2017) Global n-s Artificial bee colony RG s SaaS
algorithm
(Wang et al., 2017) Global n-s Genetic algorithm QWS s SaaS
(Liang & Du, 2017) Local+Global n-s Cooperative coevolutionary RG s SaaS
algorithm
(Jatoth et al., 2018) Local+Global n-s MapReduce-based SG s SaaS
evolutionary algorithm
(Xiaolong Xu et al., Local+Global n-s Particle swarm n-m n-s SaaS
2018) optimization algorithm
(Bouzary et al., 2018) Global n-s Invasive weed RG s n-m
optimization (IWO)
algorithm
(Zhou, Yao, Lin, Chan, Global s Adaptive multi-population RG s SaaS
& Li, 2018) differential artificial bee
colony algorithm
(continued on next page)
 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804 11

Table 4 (continued)

Publisher Author Optimization Multi-objective Algorithm Dataset QoS Cloud Layer

mode optimization constraints

(Zhang et al., 2018) Global s Biogeography-based Simulated s IaaS

optimization (BBO)
algorithm
Springer (Ye et al., 2011) Global n-s Genetic algorithm RG s IaaS,
SaaS
(Wang et al., 2013) Global n-s Particle swarm QWS,SG s SaaS
optimization
(Xiang et al., 2014) Global s Group leader algorithm RG s SaaS
(Liu et al., 2014) Global n-s Culture genetic algorithm RG s SaaS
(Huo et al., 2015) Local+Global n-s Artificial bee colony QWS,RG s SaaS
algorithm
(Seghir & Local+Global n-s Genetic algorithm, fruit fly RG s n-m
Khababa, 2016) optimization algorithm
(Alamri, 2016) n-m n-s Bees algorithm Simulated s IaaS,
PaaS
(Qi et al., 2017) Global n-s knowledge-based RG n-s SaaS
differential evolution
algorithm
(Karimi et al., 2017) Global n-s Genetic algorithm QWS s SaaS
(Liu & Zhang, 2017) Global n-s Genetic algorithm RG s SaaS
(Zhou & Yao, 2017a) Global n-s Hybrid RG s SaaS
teaching–learning-based
optimization algorithm
(Zhou & Yao, 2017c) Global n-s Hybrid artificial bee RG s SaaS
colony algorithm
(Zhou & Yao, 2017d) Global s Hybrid artificial bee RG s IaaS
colony algorithm
(Jin et al., 2017) Global n-s Genetic algorithm RG s SaaS
(Jian et al., 2018) Global s Modified bird swarm RG s IaaS
algorithm
(Khansari et al., 2018) Global s Quantum genetic Simulated s IaaS,
algorithm PaaS
(Que, Zhong, Chen, Global n-s Information entropy Simulated s IaaS
Chen, & Ji, 2018) immune genetic
algorithm
ACM (Klein et al., 2012) Global n-s Genetic algorithm RG s IaaS
(Wagner et al., 2012) Global s Genetic algorithm RG s SaaS
(Amato & Global s Multi-object genetic SG s IaaS
Venticinque, 2016) algorithm
KSII (Wang et al., 2016) Global n-s Genetic algorithm and SG s SaaS
simulated annealing
(Liu et al., 2018) Global s Hybrid multi-objective QWS s n-m
evolutionary algorithm
Taylor & (Lartigau et al., 2015) Global n-s Adapted artificial bee SG s IaaS
Francis colony algorithm
(Zhou & Yao, 2017b) Global s Hybrid artificial bee SG s SaaS
colony and cuckoo
search algorithm
s: supported, n-s: not supported, n-m: not mentioned, RG: Randomly generated dataset, SG: Synthetically generated dataset.

algorithm has been proposed by integrating the imperialist com-
petitive search and gravitational attraction search. Furthermore,
a novel imperialist competitive algorithm has been put forward
in Jula, Othman, and Sundararajan (2015), in this approach, ser-
vice providers are divided into three categories by means of PRO-
CLUS (as an appropriate clustering algorithm for high-dimensional
data), and each supplier is assigned a probability according to
the total service time, which facilitates the service composition
process. Moreover, an ant colony optimation algorithm (Wang,
Shen, & Luo, 2015) and genetic algorithm (Deng, Wu, Taheri,
Zomaya, & Wu, 2016d) have also been introduced to create
service mashups with optimal response time and cost perfor-
mance. In addition, some multi-objective methods have been
proposed for cloud service composition. in Wagner, Kloepper,
Ishikawa, and Honiden (2012) and Kholidy, Hassan, Sarhan, Erradi,
& Abdelwahed (2015) genetic algorithm-based multi-objective op-
timization algorithms have been proposed to select services that
meet users’ QoS requirements. In Feng and Kong (2015) the tri-
angular fuzzy number is used to represent the QoS attributes
and the user preferences weight, and a fuzzy multi-objective ge-
netic algorithm (FMOGA) is designed to generate optimal com-
position instance sets. In Wang, He, Shi, and Li (2016) and
Khansari et al. (2018) multi-objective cloud service composition
methods have been designed for web services and IoT appli-
cations by employing quantum genetic algorithm. In Jian, Li,
and Kuang (2018) a multi-objective method has been put for-
ward based on modified bird swarm optimization for edge cloud
computing service composition in the internet of things. In
Kumar, Bahsoon, and Chen (2018) a novel multi-tenant middleware
for dynamic service composition in the SaaS cloud has been devel-
oped by using multi-objective evolutionary algorithms.
In Ye, Zhou, and Bouguettaya (2011) a genetic algorithm based
approach has been presented to composite application services
(SaaS) and utility services (IaaS). To solve the workflow selec-
tion problem, an improved genetic algorithm has been devel-
oped in Ludwig (2012). Furthermore, some hybrid genetic algo-
rithms have been developed to address the QoS-CSC problem. Ap-
proaches based on genetic and simulated annealing algorithm have
been proposed in Wang, Ding, Yang, Mi, and Xiong (2015) and
Wang et al. (2016) to optimize the overall QoS values and
12 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804
satisfy the specific constraints in quality metrics. A hybrid genetic
algorithm has been presented in Seghir and Khababa (2016) by
integrating the genetic algorithm and fruit fly optimization
algorithm. Moreover, authors in Karimi, Isazadeh, and Rah-
mani (2017) have designed a new method for QoS-CSC problem
by integrating data mining methods and genetic algorithm. And a
new MapReduce-based evolutionary algorithm has been proposed
in Jatoth, Gangadharan, Fiore, and Buyya (2018) to composite in-
terrelated web services by combining conventional genetic algo-
rithm and estimation of distribution algorithms together. Addition-
ally, the differential evolution algorithm Qi, Xu, Xue, Wang, and
Sun (2017), particle swarm optimisation (Khanam, Kumar, & Ku-
mar, 2018; Xu, Rong, Pereira, & Trovati, 2018) are also proved to
have good performance in addressing such combinatorial optimiza-
tion problem.
In Liu, Jia, Xue, and An (2014) the problem of reliable web
service composition is converted to a local optimization problem
through global QoS restricts decomposition, and then culture ge-
netic algorithm is utilized to select optimal web service based on
QoS dynamic prediction. In Liu, Chu, Jia, Shen, and Wang (2016a) a
two-stage approach has been proposed to obtain services in dy-
namic environments, firstly, culture genetic algorithm is utilized to
choose better candidates; secondly, services are selected according
to the QoS values that predicted by an improved case-based rea-
soning method. Furthermore, in Liu et al. (2016b) a specific social
learning algorithm has been proposed, which combines improved
differential evolutionary algorithm and improved social cognitive
optimization, through experiments, this approach is proved to be
effective and efficient.
Considering the influence of the network on service quality, a
network-aware method has been proposed in Klein et al. (2012),
which handles the network QoS and service QoS separately. Fur-
thermore, a self-adaptive network-aware method has been pro-
posed in Klein, Ishikawa, and Honiden (2014), in this method, a
network model is designed to measure the network latency, and
a genetic algorithm is used to balance network latency and other
QoS attributes while reducing composition time. Also, in Wang,
Yang, and Mi (2015a) a composition model has been designed to
differentiate the QoS between network environment and services,
and a genetic algorithm is utilized to composite web service in
muti-cloud environments while minimizing the SLA violations.
A mobility-enabled approach for QoS-CSC has been presented
in Deng, Huang, Hu, Zhao, and Wu (2016b), this approach includes
three steps, firstly, a mobility model is proposed to formally model
service invocations; secondly, a QoS computation rule is specified
to obtain mobility-aware QoS values; finally, a teaching-learning-
based optimization algorithm is developed for selecting services.
Furthermore, in Deng, Huang, Wu, and Wu (2016c) a differential
evolutionary based algorithm has been proposed to handle the
problem of cloud service composition in mobile environments with
temporal constraints and QoS restrictions. In Spezzano (2016) a
self-organizing framework that supports the collection of ser-
vices in dynamic cloud environments has been proposed, in this
study, the runtime modifications of QoS are taken into consider-
ation, especially, an ant-based clustering algorithm and a multi-
objective particle swarm optimization algorithm using crowding
distance technique are designed to select services. In Wu and
Zhu (2013) the transactional properties of services have been in-
vestigated; the dynamic service composition problem is formulated
as a constrained directed acyclic graph, and the ant colony opti-
mization algorithm is utilized to seek a near-to-optimal solution. In
Zhao, Wen, and Li (2014) a negative selection immune optimization
algorithm is proposed for the large-scale and dynamic changing
web service selection problem. In Jian, Zhu, and Xia (2016) a novel
QoS interval model has been developed to capture the uncertainty
of QoS, and a service composition method is designed to cope
with the large problem size by integrating PROMETHEE into the
genetic algorithm. In Alamri (2016) the bees algorithm has been
introduced for the media service composition in the mobile health-
care environment. Additionally, in Liang and Du (2017) a novel co-
operative coevolutionary algorithm is designed for dynamic ser-
vice composition with QoS constraints and potential QoS correla-
tions. Moreover, to satisfy the long-term expectation of IaaS ser-
vice providers in dynamic cloud environments, an advanced hy-
brid adaptive genetic optimization approach has been designed in
Mistry et al. (2018).
To obtain credible, high-quality composite services, authors in
Zhang, Rao, and Wang (2015) have introduced the trust service
quality (T-QoS) and put forward a new parallel ant colony al-
gorithm. Considering the variation of QoS value, researchers in
Jian et al. (2016) have proposed an interval-based fuzzy ranking
method, in which an improved genetic algorithm (GA) is devel-
oped to composite services in diverse problem size. Furthermore,
aiming at achieving low response time, low cost, low network la-
tency, and high reliability in multi-cloud environments, authors in
Liu, Gu, Fu, Zhang, and Buyya (2018) have proposed an novel hy-
brid multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on local search,
NSGA-II (A Fast and Elitist Multiobjective Genetic Algorithm) and
differential evolution algorithm.
Researchers in Xu et al. (2017) have taken the service domain
features into consideration and developed a set of service domain
oriented artificial bee colony algorithms. Quantitative and quali-
tative non-functional properties (NFPs) of cloud services are con-
sidered separately in Wang et al. (2017), and an NFP-aware ap-
proach for QoS-CSC has been proposed based on quantitative con-
straints and qualitative preferences. Considering suppliers’ long-
term economic expectations, a novel dynamic meta-heuristic opti-
mization method has been proposed in Mistry et al. (2018). More-
over, a novel composition method for long-term service provision
has been proposed in Liu, Wei, Tang, Qin, and Yao (2015), in this
approach, three meta-heuristic approaches, tabu search, simulated
annealing and genetic algorithm, are developed to select services.
Some researchers have paid attention to the multi-cloud ser-
vice composition problem. Authors in Yu, Chen, and Li (2015) have
adopted the greedy algorithm and ant colony algorithm to se-
lect services in cross-cloud environments. Moreover, some is-
sues may arise when the number of cloud providers increases,
such as lacking interoperability, cost differences, the heterogene-
ity of current public cloud platform technologies, and dynamic
SLA conditions, these issues have been considered in Amato and
Venticinque (2016), and a multi-objective genetic algorithm has
been developed to reduce the computational time. Researchers in
Dastjerdi and Buyya (2014) focus more on compatibility issues and
an ontology-based approach is developed to examine the compat-
ibility between services, in this approach, a set of evolutionary al-
gorithms and fuzzy logic are combined to address the composition
optimization problem. In Zhang, Liu, and Liu (2015) a service com-
position method based on GA is presented to resolve the service
composition in the geo-distributed multi-cloud environments.
Authors in Xin Zhao, Shen, Peng, and Zhao (2015) have pre-
sented a method for service composition with SLA constraints, in
this approach, a fuzzy preference model is proposed to represent
users’ QoS preferences, a single evolutionary algorithm and a hy-
brid evolutionary algorithm have been both adopted to obtain the
solutions. Researchers in Jrad, Tao, Brandic, and Streit (2015) have
developed a novel utility-based genetic matching algorithm to se-
lect services and evaluate the performance of the proposed algo-
rithm by executing DNA sequencing application on a realistic sim-
ulation platform. The proposed algorithm proves to reduce execu-
tion costs while fulfilling the SLAs.
With respect to the service composition and optimal selec-
tion in cloud manufacturing, in Lartigau et al. (2015) an adapted
 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804
artificial bee colony algorithm has been proposed to tackle the is-
sue of cloud manufacturing service composition with the consid-
eration of transportation cost. In Liu and Zhang (2017) a matrix-
coded genetic algorithm with collaboratively evolutional popula-
tions has been developed for distributed manufacturing resources
composition. In Zhou and Yao (2017c) a hybrid artificial bee colony
algorithm has been proposed by employing both the probabilistic
model of Archimedean copula estimation of distribution algorithm
and the chaos operators of the global best-guided artificial bee
colony. In Bouzary, Chen, and Krishnaiyer (2018) an invasive weed
optimization algorithm has been proposed for QoS-aware service
composition in cloud manufacturing. Furthermore, in Que, Zhong,
Chen, Chen, and Ji (2018) a new information entropy immune ge-
netic algorithm (IEIGA) is proposed for adaptive manufacturing ser-
vice composition and optimal selection.
Considering the energy consumption in cloud manufacturing
system, in Xiang, Hu, Yu, and Wu (2014) a multi-objective ap-
proach has been presented by combining the group leader al-
gorithm and Pareto solution idea to offer users with high qual-
ity and low energy consumption services. Moreover, in Zhou and
Yao (2017b) and Zhou and Yao (2017d) authors have designed
multi-objective methods based on the combination of artificial bee
colony and cuckoo search, the proposed approach takes both the
service quality and the energy consumption into account.
Researchers in Zhou and Yao (2017a) have taken the ser-
vice correlations into account and then proposed a hybrid
teaching–learning-based optimization algorithm to solve the prob-
lem of manufacturing service composition. Also, in Jin, Yao, and
Chen (2017) a genetic algorithm based approach has been devel-
oped for the correlation-aware service composition in cloud man-
ufacturing. In Chen, Dou, Li, and Wu (2016) authors have proposed
an e-dominance multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (EDMOEA)
to find the Pareto optimal web services with the tradeoff of the
QoS performance and the QoS risk. In Zhang, Xu, Zhang, Yu, and
Chen (2018) a hybrid approach has been proposed to solve the
manufacturing service supply chain optimization problem by com-
bining the biogeography-based optimization (BBO) algorithm with
the intuitionistic fuzzy entropy weight (IFEW) method.
Moreover, to implement mass customization on cloud manu-
facturing, it is a promising way to assemble a set of IoT services
as a manufacturing cloud service for effectively satisfying user
customized production requirements. In Li et al. (2018) empirical
knowledge (EK) has been discussed, and an EK-oriented genetic al-
gorithm has been designed for the large-scale IoT service optimal
composition.
5. Results and discussions
This section will give answers to research questions and discuss
the results.
5.1. Research motivations (RQ1)
To obtain a comprehensive view of this topic, it is necessary
to investigate the motivations of the researchers. Research moti-
vations are classified into nine categories based on the objective
categories proposed in Jula et al. (2014), and each article can be
placed in more than one categories, as illustrated in Table 5. The
motivation categories are defined as follows:
(1) Service composition in multi-clouds (RM1). Sometimes,
services for composition are invoked from different cloud
platforms, which may bring some new problems, such as
communication delay, which need to be further studied.
(2) Improved QoS mathematical model (RM2). Accurate QoS
value is critical to the service composition. However, the
13
QoS value is often subject to fluctuations and variations be-
cause of some unexpected factors, such as network and ser-
vice correlations. To makes the QoS value more in line with
the service characteristics, some scholars have improved QoS
mathematical models to obtain a more precise QoS value.
(3) Proposing new approaches (RM3). Achieving certain goals,
such as reducing the composition time, handling problems
of uncertainty and dynamism, requires changes for the cur-
rent approach. In some cases, new approaches have been de-
signed to achieve these goals.
(4) Algorithm improvements (RM4). Some advanced strategies
are proposed to improve the algorithm’s solution process or
search strategy to reduce time consumption or avoid local
optimization.
(5) Self-adaptable, automatic, or dynamic composition (RM5).
Due to the uncertainty of the cloud environments, self-
adaptable, automated, or dynamic service composition ap-
proaches have been paid much attention to get better solu-
tions. In these approaches, evaluating the QoS value of the
services, balancing the optimization of different QoS param-
eters, and improving the convergence speed are important
issues.
(6) Increasing reliability, accuracy, trustworthiness and pri-
vacy assurance (RM6). One of the key factors that attract
consumers utilizing cloud service is reliability, but in dy-
namic and open cloud environments, the randomness of ser-
vices results in a low success rate. To provide a reliable
and trusted service composition with privacy protection, re-
searchers have to consider this problem seriously.
(7) Reducing the composition cost (RM7). Efforts are made to
reduce the composition cost under time constraints.
(8) Decreasing the time complexity (RM8). Reducing the time
complexity is always an important fundamental aim in solv-
ing optimization problems.
(9) Satisfy customers’ requirements (RM9). Strictly comply
with consumers’ QoS requirements, and simplify the service
composition process would improve customer satisfaction.
The percentage and number of each motivation category are
shown in Fig. 5; it can be found that much of the attention focuses
on RM8 (decreasing the time complexity), which means reducing
response time is the most important motivation for researchers.
This is because customers’ needs frequently change, so reducing
response time is the key to ensuring that cloud services are deliv-
ered on demand in real time. Conversely, few studies consider RM8
(reducing the composition cost); this may be because the price of
cloud service is already very low. Moreover, some researches aim
to achieve multiple optimization goals simultaneously, such as low
response time, low cost, low network latency and high reliability
(Jula et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2018).
5.2. Active researchers (RQ2)
In this study, researchers are taken as an active researcher
when they have more than two included articles. Active re-
searchers and their papers are listed in Table 6, and the affiliation
of authors has also been paid attention. It can be observed that
two authors: Athman Bouguettaya and Xifan Yao have the largest
number of articles. The main difference is that Xifan Yao focus on
the fileld of QoS-aware cloud manufacturing service composition.
5.3. QoS parameters and QoS aggregating techniques(RQ3)
5.3.1. QoS parameters
In this section, the QoS parameters included in the litera-
ture have been investigated. Based on Table 7, it can be found
14 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804

Table 5
Desired motivations in the investigated researches.

Publisher Reference RM1 RM2 RM3 RM4 RM5 RM6 RM7 RM8 RM9
√ √ √
IEEE (Kofler et al., 2009)
√ √ √ √
(Wang et al., 2011)
√ √ √ √
(Hossain et al., 2012)
√ √ √
(Ludwig, 2012)
√ √ √
(Bao & Dou, 2012)
√ √ √
(Wu & Khoury, 2012)
√
(Cui et al., 2012)
√ √ √
(Li et al., 2013)
√ √
(Yu & Bouguettaya, 2013)
√ √ √ √
(Jula et al., 2013)
√ √ √
(Karim et al., 2013)
√ √ √
(Tao et al., 2013)
√ √ √ √
(Dastjerdi & Buyya, 2014)
√ √ √ √ √
(Klein et al., 2014)
√ √ √
(Huang et al., 2014b)
√ √
(Neiat et al., 2014)
√ √ √
(Zhang et al., 2015)
√ √ √ √ √
(Dou et al., 2015)
√
(Liu et al., 2015)
√ √ √
(Mostafa & Zhang, 2015)
√ √
(Wang et al., 2015)
√ √ √
(Feng & Kong, 2015)
√ √ √
(Zhang et al., 2015)
√ √ √
(Ye et al., 2016)
√ √ √
(Zhang et al., 2016)
√ √ √ √
(Deng et al., 2016a)
√ √ √
(Deng et al., 2016b)
√ √ √ √ √
(Wang et al., 2016)
√ √ √ √
(Chen et al., 2016)
√ √ √ √
(Deng et al., 2016c)
√ √
(Deng et al., 2016d)
√
(Wang et al., 2016)
√ √ √ √ √
(Wu et al., 2017)
√ √ √
(Bharathan et al., 2017)
√ √ √ √
(Wang et al., 2018)
√ √ √
(Kurdi et al., 2018)
√ √ √ √
(Mistry et al., 2018)
√ √ √
(Huang et al., 2018)
√
(Khanam et al., 2018)
√ √
(Li et al., 2018)
√ √ √
(Kumar et al., 2018)
√ √ √
Elsevier (Qi et al., 2012)
√ √
(Wu & Zhu, 2013)
√ √ √ √
(Li et al., 2014)
√ √ √
(Huang et al., 2014a)
√ √ √
(Zhao et al., 2014)
√ √
(Jula et al., 2015)
√ √ √ √ √
(Wang et al., 2015a)
√ √ √
(Yu et al., 2015)
√ √ √ √
(Xin Zhao et al., 2015)
√ √ √
(Wang et al., 2015)
√ √ √ √
(Jrad et al., 2015)
√ √
(Pourhaji Kazem et al., 2015)
√ √ √
(Jian et al., 2016)
√ √ √ √ √
(Liu et al., 2016a)
√ √
(Liu et al., 2016b)
√ √ √
(Spezzano, 2016)
√ √
(Chen et al., 2016)
√ √
(Wang, Wang, Hu et al., 2016)
√ √ √
(Xu et al., 2017)
√ √ √ √ √
(Gabrel et al., 2017)
√ √ √ √
(Wang et al., 2017)
√ √ √ √ √
(Liang & Du, 2017)
√ √
(Zhu et al., 2018)
√ √ √
(Jatoth et al., 2018)
√ √
(Xiaolong Xu et al., 2018)
√
(Bouzary et al., 2018)
√ √ √ √ √
(Zhou et al., 2018)
√ √ √
(Zhang et al., 2018)
√ √
Springer (Ye et al., 2011)
√ √
(Wang et al., 2013)
√ √
(Xiang et al., 2014)
√ √ √ √
(Liu et al., 2014)
√ √ √ √
(Huo et al., 2015)
√ √ √ √
(Seghir & Khababa, 2016)
(continued on next page)
 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804 15

Table 5 (continued)

Publisher Reference RM1 RM2 RM3 RM4 RM5 RM6 RM7 RM8 RM9
√ √
(Alamri, 2016)
√ √
(Qi et al., 2017)
√ √
(Karimi et al., 2017)
√ √ √
(Liu & Zhang, 2017)
√ √
(Zhou & Yao, 2017a)
√ √ √
(Zhou & Yao, 2017c)
√ √
(Zhou & Yao, 2017d)
√ √
(Jin et al., 2017)
√ √ √
(Badidi et al., 2018)
√ √ √
(Jian et al., 2018)
√ √ √
(Ghobaei-Arani et al., 2018)
√ √ √ √
(Khansari et al., 2018)
√ √ √
(Que et al., 2018)
√ √ √
ACM (Alrifai et al., 2010)
√
(Hang & Singh, 2011)
√ √ √ √
(Klein et al., 2012)
√ √ √
(Wagner et al., 2012)
√ √ √
(Ye et al., 2014)
√ √ √ √
(Amato & Venticinque, 2016)
√ √ √ √
KSII (Wang et al., 2015b)
√ √ √
(Wang et al., 2016)
√ √ √ √
(Liu et al., 2018)
√ √
Taylor & Francis (Huang et al., 2014)
√
(Lartigau et al., 2015)
√ √ √
(Zhou & Yao, 2017b)
√ √ √ √
Sersc (Lu et al., 2014)
√ √ √ √ √
(Xiao & Liu, 2014)
√ √ √
Inass (Bhushan & Ch, 2016)
√ √
IEICE (Huang et al., 2013)
√ √ √
Wiley (Yang et al., 2013)

Fig. 5. (a) Percentage of each motivation category and (b) Number of each motivation category.

that QoS parameters include generic ones such as cost, time,
throughput, reputation, as well as domain-dependent ones, like
image-related QoS (resolution, color depth) (Wu & Zhu, 2013),
manufacturing-related QoS (energy, maintainability, function sim-
ilarity, eco-impact) (Tao et al., 2013; Lartigau et al., 2015), media-
related QoS (server profile, video bandwidth) (Alamri, 2016). In ad-
dition, user-perceived QoS parameters have also been introduced
by some researchers (Li et al., 2014). In this study, we focus on
generic QoS. More than 40 QoS parameters are included in the
literature, to analyze conveniently, the parameters that focus on
the relevant service attributes are classified into one group, as is
shown in Table 8. As a result, the number of QoS parameters is
reduced to 23. According to Fig. 6, it can be found that the most
considered QoS parameters were response time (24%), cost (19%),
availability (16%), reliability (15%), reputation (7%) and throughput
(6%).
5.3.2. QoS aggregating techniques
The aggregation formulas of the most used QoS attributes are
shown in Table 9 (Amato & Venticinque, 2016; Karimi et al., 2017;
Kholidy et al., 2015; Liu et al., 2015; Seghir & Khababa, 2016; Wang
et al., 2015a). It can be found that only a few articles have stud-
ied QoS aggregation in multiple modes. Most articles focus only
on service combinations in sequential mode.
5.4. Applied approaches and datasets (RQ4)
5.4.1. Applied approaches
Based on the research above, methods used in QoS-CSC are
classified into three groups: non-heuristic, heuristics and meta-
heuristics. According to Fig. 7, it can be found that 22% of the pa-
pers focus on non-heuristic, 19% focus on heuristics, and 59% focus
on meta-heuristics. Meta-heuristic algorithms are the most widely
used computational intelligence techniques in this field. This is
16 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804

Table 6
Active researchers and their papers.

Author Number of papers Papers Affiliation

Athman 6 (Ye et al., 2011), (Yu & Bouguettaya, 2013), (Ye et al., Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne,
Bouguettaya 2014), (Ye et al., 2016), (Mistry et al., 2018), Australia
(Neiat et al., 2014)
Xifan Yao 6 (Zhou & Yao, 2017a), (Zhou & Yao, 2017b), (Zhou & South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China
Yao, 2017c), (Zhou & Yao, 2017d), (Zhou et al., 2018),
(Jin et al., 2017)
Jiajun Zhou 5 (Zhou & Yao, 2017a), (Zhou & Yao, 2017b), (Zhou & South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China
Yao, 2017c), (Zhou & Yao, 2017d), (Zhou et al., 2018)
Shangguang Wang 5 (Wang et al., 2011), (Wang et al., 2013), (Lu et al., 2014), Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications,
(Wang et al., 2016), (Wang et al., 2018) Beijing, China
Wanchun Dou 5 (Bao & Dou, 2012), (Qi et al., 2012), (Dou et al., 2015), Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
(Yang et al., 2013), (Wu et al., 2017)
Zhen Ye 4 (Ye et al., 2011), (Ye et al., 2014), (Ye et al., 2016), University of Queensland, Royal Melbourne Institute of
(Neiat et al., 2014) Technology, Australia
Zhi-Zhong Liu 4 (Liu et al., 2014), (Liu et al., 2016a), (Liu et al., 2016b), Henan Polytechnic University, Harbin Institute of
(Xu et al., 2017) Technology, China
Jun Huang 4 (Huang et al., 2013), (Huang et al., 2014a), (Huang et al., Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications,
2014b), (Huang et al., 2018) Chongqing, China
Qiang Duan 4 (Huang et al., 2013), (Huang et al., 2014a), (Huang et al., The Pennsylvania State University, USA
2014b), (Huang et al., 2018)
Dandan Wang 4 (Wang et al., 2015), (Wang et al., 2015a), (Wang et al., University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing,
Yang Yang 4 2015b), (Wang et al., 2016) China
Zhenqiang Mi 4
Shuiguang Deng 4 (Deng et al., 2016a), (Deng et al., 2016b), (Deng et al., Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
2016c), (Deng et al., 2016d)
Zhaohui Wu 3 (Deng et al., 2016b), (Deng et al., 2016c), (Deng et al., Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
2016d)
Hongyue Wu 3 (Deng et al., 2016a), (Deng et al., 2016c), (Deng et al., Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
2016d)
Jinjun Chen 3 (Dou et al., 2015), (Qi et al., 2012), (Wu et al., 2017) University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Xiaofang Zhou 3 (Ye et al., 2011), (Ye et al., 2014), (Ye et al., 2016), University of Queensland, Australia
Li Liu 3 (Liu, et al., 2018), (Wang et al., 2016), (Zhang, et al., University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing,
2015) China
Fuyuki Ishikawa 3 (Klein et al., 2012), (Klein et al., 2014), (Wagner et al., National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan
2012)
Shinichi Honiden 3 (Klein et al., 2012), (Klein et al., 2014), (Wagner et al., The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
2012)

Fig. 6. Percentages of each QoS parameter and (b) Number of each QoS parameter.

justified by the fact that QoS-CSC is NP-hard and it needs to be
solved in an acceptable amount of time.
To further investigate the meta-heuristic method, we examined
all of the metaheuristic algorithms used in the literature, includ-
ing genetic algorithm (GA), evolutionary algorithm (EA), imperial-
ist competitive algorithm (ICA), artificial bee colony (ABC), particle
swarm optimization (PSO), ant colony optimization (ACO), social
learning optimization (SLO), fruit fly optimization algorithm (FOA),
differential evolution (DE), teaching-learning-based optimization
(TLBO), simulated annealing (SA), tabu search (TS), immune algo-
rithm (IA), invasive weed optimization (IWO), biogeography-based
optimization (BBO), group leader algorithm (GLA), bees algorithm
(BA), quantum genetic algorithm (QGA), bird swarm algorithm
(BSA), immune genetic algorithm (IGA) and cooperative coevolu-
tion (CC). The number of papers of each meta-heuristic algorithms
and their percentage are specified in Fig. 8. It can be observed that
genetic algorithms are the most widely used meta-heuristic algo-
rithm in this field.
 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804
Table 7
QoS Parameters included in the literature.
Publisher Author
IEEE (Kofler et al., 2009)
(Wang et al., 2011)
(Hossain et al., 2012)
(Ludwig, 2012)
(Bao & Dou, 2012)
(Wu & Khoury, 2012)
(Cui et al., 2012)
(Li et al., 2013)
(Yu & Bouguettaya, 2013)
(Jula et al., 2013)
(Karim et al., 2013)
(Tao et al., 2013)
(Dastjerdi & Buyya, 2014)
(Klein et al., 2014)
(Huang et al., 2014b)
(Neiat et al., 2014)
(Zhang et al., 2015)
(Dou et al., 2015)
(Liu et al., 2015)
(Mostafa & Zhang, 2015)
(Wang et al., 2015)
(Feng & Kong, 2015)
(Zhang et al., 2015)
(Ye et al., 2016)
(Zhang et al., 2016)
(Deng et al., 2016a)
(Deng et al., 2016b)
(Wang et al., 2016)
(Chen et al., 2016)
(Deng et al., 2016c)
(Deng et al., 2016d)
(Wang et al., 2016)
(Wu et al., 2017)
(Bharathan et al., 2017)
(Wang et al., 2018)
(Kurdi et al., 2018)
(Mistry et al., 2018)
(Huang et al., 2018)
(Khanam et al., 2018)
(Li et al., 2018)
(Kumar et al., 2018)
Elsevier (Qi et al., 2012)
(Wu & Zhu, 2013)
(Li et al., 2014)
(Huang et al., 2014a)
(Zhao et al., 2014)
(Jula et al., 2015)
(Wang et al., 2015a)
(Yu et al., 2015)
(Xin Zhao et al., 2015)
(Wang et al., 2015)
(Jrad et al., 2015)
(Pourhaji Kazem et al.,
2015)
(Jian et al., 2016)
(Liu et al., 2016a)
(Liu et al., 2016b)
(Spezzano, 2016)
(Chen et al., 2016)
(Wang, Wang, Hu et al.,
2016)
(Xu et al., 2017)
(Gabrel et al., 2017)
(Wang et al., 2017)
(Liang & Du, 2017)
(Zhu et al., 2018)
(Jatoth et al., 2018)
(Xiaolong Xu et al., 2018)
(Bouzary et al., 2018)
(Zhou et al., 2018)
(Zhang et al., 2018)
17
QoS parameters
Execution time, Cost
Price, Response time, Throughput, Reputation, Availability, Reliability
Response time, Cost
Response time, Cost, Availability, Reliability
Response time, Cost, Reliability, Availability, Reputation
Cost, Time, Reliability, Availability.
Response time, Price, Reliability, Reputation
Response time, Execution time, Communication latency
Latency, Reliability, Availability, Fee, Reputation
Response time, Execution fees
Response time, Availability, Data control, Reliability, Usability, Reputation, Security, Cost
Cost, Time, Reliability, Energy, Trust, Maintainability, Function similarity
Compatibility, Cost, Deployment time, Reliability
Latency, Price
Execution time, Response time
Service time, Freshness, Certainty
Reliability, Security, Response time
Execution price, Execution latency, Reputation, Successful execution rate, Availability
Response time, Cost, Availability, Reliability
Availability, Response time, Cost
Time, Availability, Price, Reputation
Price, Time, Delay, Availability, Reliability, Reputation
Cost, Response time, Reliability
Response time, Throughput, Cost
Waiting time, Service time, Cost, Reputation, Reliability, Availability
Cost, Response time, Availability, Reliability, Reputation
Cost, Response time, Throughput, Availability
Delay, Throughput, Reliability
Response Time, Cost, Availability, Reliability, Throughput, Reputation
Execution cost, Response time, Reliability, Availability
Price, Response time
Response Time, Availability, Reliability, Throughput, Latency, Success Rate
Price, Latency
Response time, Availability, Reliability, Throughput, Successability
Latency, Throughput, Reliability
Execution time, Number of combined clouds
Availability, Response time, Throughput, Price
Response Time, Execution time, Process latency, Storage Capacity, Cost, Delay, Bandwidth
Response time, Availability, Reliability
Execution time, Respond time, Cost, Availability, Reliability, Energy
Throughput, Response time, Cost.
Reputation, Price, Duration, Availability, Success Rate
Domain-independent (response time, availability, reliability); Domain-dependent (resolution or color depth for
image processing services)
Generic QoS (Response time, Availability, Price, Reliability); Domain-specific QoS; User-perceived QoS
Execution time
Time, Cost, Avaliability, Reliability
Service time
Response time, Availability, Price, Reputation
Number of clouds
Price, Response time, Throughput, Availability
Execution time, Cost
Response time, Availability, Latency, Throughput
Response time, Availability, Throughput, Reliability, Latency
Response time, Price, Latency, Availability, Successability, Reliability, Throughput, Reputation
Cost, Availability, Response time, Reliability
Cost, Availability, Response time, Reliability, Success execution rate
Response time, Latency, Availability, Reliability, Successability, Throughput
Execution time, Latency time, Cost, Availability, Reliability
Cost, Response time, Availability, Reliability
Cost, Response time, Reliability, Availability
Execution time, Throughput, Cost, Reliability
Time, Price, Availability, Reliability, Platform, Location, Provider
Time, Cost, Reputation, Success rate, Availability
Response time, Throughput
Price, Throughput, Availability, Reliability, Response time
Response Time, Execution Cost, Reliability, Availability
Cost, Time, Availability, Reliability
Cost, Time, Availability, Reliability, Reputation
Cost, Time, Availability, Reliability
(continued on next page)
18 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804

Table 7 (continued)

Publisher Author QoS parameters

Springer (Ye et al., 2011) Response time, Cost, Availability, Reputation

(Wang et al., 2013)
(Xiang et al., 2014)
(Liu et al., 2014)
(Huo et al., 2015)
(Seghir & Khababa, 2016)
(Alamri, 2016)
(Qi et al., 2017)
(Karimi et al., 2017)
(Liu & Zhang, 2017)
(Zhou & Yao, 2017a)
(Zhou & Yao, 2017c)
(Zhou & Yao, 2017d)
(Jin et al., 2017)
(Badidi et al., 2018)
(Jian et al., 2018)
(Ghobaei-Arani et al.,
2018)
(Khansari et al., 2018)
(Que et al., 2018)
ACM (Alrifai et al., 2010)
(Hang & Singh, 2011)
(Klein et al., 2012)
(Wagner et al., 2012)
(Ye et al., 2014)
(Amato &
Venticinque, 2016)
KSII (Wang et al., 2015b)
(Wang et al., 2016)
(Liu et al., 2018)
Taylor & (Huang et al., 2014)
Francis (Lartigau et al., 2015)
(Zhou & Yao, 2017b)
Sersc (Lu et al., 2014)
(Xiao & Liu, 2014)
Inass (Bhushan & Ch, 2016)
IEICE (Huang et al., 2013)
Wiley (Yang et al., 2013)
Response Time, Latency, Availability, Reliability, Successability, Throughput
Service processing time, Cost, Reliability
Cost, Response time, Availability, Reliability
Response time, Availability, Throughput, Price, Reputation
Reliability, Availability, Time, Reputation, Throughput, Price
Media-related QoS (server profile, video bandwidth)
Response time, Availability, Reliability
Response time, Availability, Price, Successability
Time, Cost, Reliability
Time, Cost, Availability, Reliability
Time, Cost, Availability, Reliability
Time, Cost, Availability, Reliability
Execution time, Cost, Availability, Reliability
Freshness of context information, Precision, Probability of correctness
Time, Cost, Availability, Reliability
Response time, Cost, Availability, Reliability
Response time, Cost, Availability, Reliability, Latency
Time, Reliability, Cost, Ability
Response time, Price, Availability, Reliability, Throughput, Reputation
Latency, Throughput, Failure
Network latency, Transfer rate, Execution time
Price, Response time, Reliability
Reputation, Throughput, Cost
Time, Cost, Availability, Reliability
Response time, Availability, Price, Reputation, Network delay, Network availability
Time, Availability, Price, Reputation
Response time, Reliability, Cost
Time, Cost, Reliability, Energy
Price, Manufacturing time, Reliability, Maintainability, Availability, Eco-impact
Time, Price, Availability, Reputation
Execution time, Reliability, Availability, Throughput, Comprehensive evaluation
Availability, Cost, Execution time, Reputation
Price, Response time, Availability, Throughput, Successability
Running time
Price, Duration, Availability, Reputation, Success rate

Fig. 7. (a) Approach categories and (b) Number of papers in each category.

In general, researchers often make some improvements to the
basic algorithms. Sometimes more than two methods may be
adopted together in one article. Some researchers proposed a new
algorithm by integrating two or more existing methods, and the
new method has proven to be more effective (Jula et al., 2013; Liu
et al., 2016b).
5.4.2. Datasets
In order to assess the proposed methods and analyze their per-
formance, authors need to conduct experiments by using dataset.
According to Tables 7–9, the most commonly used are three
datasets, QWS, WS-DREAM, and OWL-S XPlan. The QWS dataset
was collected by Al-Masri and Mahmoud (Al-Masri & Mahmoud,
20 07, 20 09), including 2507 real Web services, each service has
nine quality parameters, such as reliability, throughput, success-
ability, etc. WS-DREAM dataset includes 4532 real Web services
(Zheng & Lyu, 2008; Zheng et al., 2010), two quality parameters,
response time and throughput, are considered. OWL-S XPlan pack-
age (Klusch & Gerber, 2006) is a semantic service composition
planner with a default web service test set (Kurdi et al., 2018).
In addition, synthetically generated dataset, randomly generated
dataset and simulated datasets are also used to evaluate the pro-
posed method.
 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804 19

Fig. 8. (a) Percentage of each meta-heuristic algorithm and (b) Number of papers of each meta-heuristic algorithm.

Table 8
Classification of QoS parameters.

QoS parameters Relevant parameters included in each group

Time Response time, Execution time, Time, Running time, Service time, Deployment time, Waiting time, Duration
Cost Cost, Price, Execution cost, Execution price, Execution fees, Fee
Latency Latency, Latency time, Communication latency, Execution latency, Network latency, Process latency, Delay
Successability Successability, Success rate, Successful execution rate
Reliability Certainty, Reliability
Reputation Reputation, Trust
Comprehensive Evaluation Comprehensive evaluation, Ability

Table 9
QoS aggregation techniques for four composition modes.

QoS Parameters Composition Mode

Sequential:(n Parallel:(n parallel Conditional:(called CSi,j Loop:(called CSi,j h

sequential cloud cloud services) with pri probability) times)
services)

n 
n 
n
Response time(QRT ) qRT (C Si, j ) qRT (C Si, j ) [qRT (C Si, j )∗pri ] h∗ qRT (CSi,j )
i=1 i=1 i=1
n n n
Cost(Qc ) qc (C Si, j ) qc (C Si, j ) [qc (C Si, j ) ∗ pri ] h∗ qc (CSi,j )
i=1 i=1 i=1

n 
n n
Availability(QAva ) qAva (C Si, j ) qAva (C Si, j ) [qAva (C Si, j ) ∗ pri ] [qAva (CSi,j )]h
i=1 i=1 i=1

n 
n n
Reliability(QRel ) qRel (C Si, j ) qRel (C Si, j ) [qRel (C Si, j ) ∗ pri ] [qRel (CSi,j )]h
i=1 i=1 i=1
n
Reputation(QRep ) avgni=1 qRep (C Si, j ) avgni=1 qRep (C Si, j ) [qRep (C Si, j ) ∗ pri ] qRep (CSi,j )
i=1
n
Throughput(QThr ) minni=1 qT hr (C Si, j ) minni=1 qT hr (C Si, j ) [qT hr (C Si, j ) ∗ pri ] qRep (CSi,j )
i=1

n 
n n
Latency(QLat ) qLat (C Si, j ) qLat (C Si, j ) [qLat (C Si, j )∗pri ] h∗ qLat (CSi,j )
i=1 i=1 i=1

n 
n n
Successability(QSuc ) qSuc (C Si, j ) qSuc (C Si, j ) [qSuc (C Si, j ) ∗ pri ] [qSuc (CSi,j )]h
i=1 i=1 i=1
n
q(CSi,j ) denotes the QoS value of service CSi,j . In the case of the conditional composition mode: i=1 pri = 1 and n is the number of choices.

5.5. Optimization strategy (RQ5)
We analyzed the optimization strategies of the current research
from three aspects: optimization mode, multi-objective optimiza-
tion strategy and QoS constraints strategy.
5.5.1. Optimization mode
Three optimization modes are utilized in the literature, includ-
ing local optimization mode, global optimization mode and hybrid
optimization mode (local and global). According to Fig. 9, 87% of
the articles focus on global optimization mode, 10% focus on hy-
brid optimization mode, and the rest focus on local optimization
mode.
5.5.2. Multi-objective optimization
It means that several QoS parameters are considered as opti-
mization targets. For example, some researchers try to optimize re-
sponse time and cost at the same time. Articles supporting multi-
objective optimization have been investigated; the percentage and
number are shown in Fig. 10, it can be observed that only 30% of
the analyzed methods support multi-objective optimization, which
means that most articles only take one of the QoS parameters or
total QoS as the optimization goal.
20 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804

Fig. 9. (a) Percentage of each optimization mode and (b) Number of each optimization mode.

Fig. 10. (a) Percentage of papers supporting multi-objective optimization and (b) Number of papers supporting multi-objective optimization.

Fig. 11. (a)Percentage of papers supporting QoS constraints and (b) Number of papers supporting QoS constraints.

5.5.3. QoS constraints 5.6. Observation on cloud layers(RQ7)

The purpose of QoS-CSC is to select a set of specific services
that meet the user’s specific requirements on QoS. However, there
are still some studies that do not consider QoS constraints. Accord-
ing to Fig. 11, 83% of studies support QoS constraints, 11% do not
support QoS constraints, and the remaining 6% has not mentioned
whether they provide support.
In cloud environments, service composition may happen at dif-
ferent cloud layers (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS). The composition mecha-
nism is investigated and the result is illustrated in Fig. 12. Accord-
ing to this figure, it can be found that the majority of studies only
consider service composition at the same layer, 66% of studies fo-
cus on the SaaS layer, 19% focus on the IaaS layer, only 10% focus
 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804
Fig. 12. (a) Percentage of papers in term of Cloud layers and (b) Number of papers in term of Cloud layers.
on multi-layers, the rest 5% not mentioned which cloud layers are
considered.
5.7. Research challenges and future directions(RQ8)
After analyzing the data collected through this mapping study,
we observed that there are still some problems unresolved in the
existing research. In the following, we will provide a brief descrip-
tion of the existing research challenges, and identify the future re-
search directions.
5.7.1. Flexible QoS model of cloud service
In cloud environments, services may be composted in a pub-
lic cloud, private cloud, or hybrid clouds. Services could either be
provided by a single provider or composited in multi-cloud en-
vironments (Dou et al., 2015; Mezni & Sellami, 2017). Moreover,
cloud service composition may happen at multiple cloud layers
(e.g., SaaS and IaaS layers) (Ye, Bouguettaya, & Zhou, 2013; Ye et al.,
2011). Different component services may have their specific char-
acteristics, and a single QoS model cannot represent all QoS pa-
rameters for service composition in different environments (Vakili
& Navimipou, 2017). However, researchers are still used to resolve
the service composition problem by designing a single QoS model.
Accordingly, a more flexible QoS model is required to describe dif-
ferent aspects of the quality attributes of different component ser-
vices (Li et al., 2014).
5.7.2. QoS evaluation in a dynamic environment
The QoS values of cloud services are often subject to fluctua-
tions and variations because of numerous uncertainties, e.g., net-
work congestion and communication delay (X. Jian et al., 2016; Su,
Xiao, Liu, Zhang, & Zhang, 2016). How to obtain adequate and pre-
cise QoS parameter data has always been a key issue in cloud ser-
vice composition problem (Ma, Zhu, Hu, Tang, & Dong, 2017; Mao,
Chen, Towey, Chen, & Xie, 2015). There is a need to consider the
uncertainty of QoS (Yin et al., 2014), handle QoS probability distri-
bution (H. Zheng, Yang, & Zhao, 2016), and propose more efficient
QoS prediction approaches (Luo, Liu, Zhang, & Chang, 2016).
5.7.3. Inter-service correlations (dependency and conflict)
The QoS value of composite service depends on both on it-
self and other services (Bao & Dou, 2012), thus inter-dependency
and conflict correlations often arise because of the incompatibil-
ity between services (Ai & Tang, 2008; Dastjerdi & Buyya, 2014).
Since this correlation affects the QoS value (Deng et al., 2016a), it
21
has significant impacts on cloud service selection and composition.
Therefore, it is required to handle inter-service dependencies and
conflicts in the process of cloud service composition problem.
5.7.4. Many-objective optimization for cloud service composition
Cloud service composition faces a great challenge posed by
users with diverse QoS requirements and fuzzy preferences, so it
is hard to make appropriate trade-offs between different QoS pa-
rameters (Cremene, Suciu, Pallez, & Dumitrescu, 2015). Recently,
this problem has been partially resolved from the perspective of
multi-objective optimization, but only a few QoS parameters (e.g.
cost, response time) have been considered as optimization objects.
(Amato & Venticinque, 2016; Chen et al., 2016; Kholidy et al., 2015;
Liu & Zhang, 2015). Moreover, these methods have exposed defects
when the number of targets arises. For another, some technique,
like NSGA-III (Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm, the Third
Version) (Yu, Ma, & Zhang, 2015), can provide an excellent support
mechanism for many-objective optimization (Ramírez et al., 2017),
however, these techniques are seldom used in QoS-CSC problems.
This calls for further research on many-objective optimization of
cloud service composition.
5.7.5. Cloud service composition in the mobile environment
Nowadays, because of popular mobile devices and ubiquitous
internet connectivity, services can be available in different sce-
narios, but some new issues will also appear due to some un-
predictable factors, such as changes in signal strength of the mo-
bile network. Therefore, some new techniques have to be proposed
to increase the adaptability of services composition under spa-
tiotemporal constraints (Kasamatsu, Kumar, & Hu, 2017), such as
mobility-aware QoS computation rule (Deng et al., 2016a), dynamic
and automatic composition model (Liu, Xue, Shen, & Li, 2013; Paik,
Chen, & Huhns, 2014; Wang, Wang, Zhang, Yu, & Hu, 2016).
5.7.6. Secure and reliable cloud service composition
Due to the open and shared characteristic of cloud comput-
ing, it is vulnerable to different types of malicious access and
threats (Brucker, Zhou, Malmignati, Shi, & Merabti, 2017), which
will lead to some security issues, such as information flow secu-
rity and authorization. A few security issues have been concerned
in Bharathi, Vijayakumar, and Pradeep (2015), Dou et al. (2015),
Lin, Hu, and Zhang (2016), Xi, Sun, Ma, and Shen (2015), but have
not been solved well. In-depth research is required to support se-
cure and reliable service composition.
22 Q. She, X. Wei and G. Nie et al. / Expert Systems With Applications 138 (2019) 112804
6. Study limitations
Although we do our utmost to ensure the rigor and objectivity
of the research, the results of this study may still be affected by
certain limitations. In the following, a summary of the limitations
existing in this study will be provided.
6.1. Limitations in search scope
One of the main purposes of this study is to explore the largest
possible number of publications. However, to ensure the quality of
the selected studies and reduce bias, we have omitted a search for
grey literature that not being formally published, such as technical
reports or graduate theses. On one hand, we assumed that high-
quality grey literature research will be published in a journal or
conference in the future, on the one hand, there are so many jour-
nal articles and conference papers published in recent years, we
think that the gray literature will not affect our research results.
However, it also should be noted that only international journal
articles and conference papers are concerned in this study.
6.2. Limitations in data sources
In our study, studies were retrieved by an automated search
from five different databases: Google Scholar, Springer, IEEE, Sci-
ence Direct and ACM. Some other databases, such as Doaj can’t
be accessed. This may lead to some relevant studies not indexed
within our choices. To address this issue, on the one hand, we
adopted backward snowballing method to find more relevant ar-
ticles, on the other hand, we used Google Scholar to explore the
potentially relevant studies to the largest extent. However, it is still
important to consider the absence of some important studies.
7. Conclusions and future works
This mapping study sought to give an overview of the research
on QoS-aware cloud service composition from the perspective of
computational intelligence. For this, a search protocol has been
well defined, and 105 articles published from 2009 to 2018 were
selected as primary studies.
This study introduced a classification of service composition
techniques, including non-heuristic (exact), heuristic and meta-
heuristic, and then made a comprehensive examination of the se-
lected primary studies from various aspects. The main findings of
this study showed that reducing response time is the most impor-
tant motivation for researchers, it takes great priority over reduc-
ing composition cost. The observation on QoS parameters demon-
strated that the most considered QoS parameters were response
time (24%), cost (19%), availability (16%), reliability (15%), repu-
tation (7%) and throughput (6%). The observation on algorithm
demonstrated that the most used approach for solving QoS-aware
service composition was meta-heuristic (59%) algorithm, and ge-
netic algorithm (33%) is the most popular meta-heuristic algo-
rithm. Three datasets are widely used to help verify the pro-
posed approaches, including QWS, WS-DREAM, and OWL-S XPlan.
In terms of optimization strategy, most of the articles (87%) fo-
cus on global optimization mode, 83% of studies support QoS con-
straints, but only 30% of the approaches support multi-objective
optimization. It can also be found that the majority of studies only
consider service composition in the same layer, 66% of studies fo-
cus on the SaaS layer, 19% focus on the IaaS layer, only 10% focus
on multi-layers (IaaS and SaaS layers), Moreover, active researchers
in this field and their papers have also been investigated. Further-
more, this study points out that there exist some research chal-
lenges and need further studies, such as a flexible QoS model of
cloud service, QoS value evaluation in dynamic environments, etc.
In summary, this study provided a comprehensive description
and investigation on QoS-CSC from the perspective of computa-
tional intelligence, which can provide a solid basis for both re-
searchers and practitioners and bring a lot of benefits. Firstly, it
can provide a starting point for researchers who are interested
in this field, helps to save efforts and help them make more im-
provements. Secondly, this study can help lower learning curve and
bias to conduct a further literature review, as the search protocol
can be used again. Thirdly, in the context of expert and intelli-
gent systems, our approach is of significance to enterprise man-
agement in the current fiercely competitive business environment.
With the development of the internet of things and 5G networks, a
lot of resources can be encapsulated into cloud services, this study
can assist in the design and development of expert and intelli-
gent systems in enterprises, and the bottlenecks faced by small-
and medium-sized enterprises can be solved by the effective ser-
vice composition techniques.
In future research, our work will be unfolded in two directions.
On the one hand, we will focus on the cloud service composition
with a time window. Current studies often assume that services
are provided together, but in practical applications, multiple tasks
did not execute at the same time, some non-critical tasks can be
delayed. Therefore, we not only need to choose a suitable set of
services, but we also need to determine the invocation time of
each particular service. This work can help save cost and balance
load, especially when the price of the cloud service fluctuates with
time. On the other hand, we also paid much attention to service
composition across multiple cloud layers; we attempt to propose a
flexible QoS model for cloud service.
Declaration of interests
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to
influence the work reported in this paper.
Credit authorship contribution statement
Qiping She: Validation, Visualization, Writing - original draft.
Xiaochao Wei: Data curation, Funding acquisition, Writing - re-
view & editing. Guihua Nie: Conceptualization, Formal analysis,
Methodology. Donglin Chen: Investigation, Project administration,
Supervision.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the China Postdoctoral Science
Foundation funded project (No. 2014M552102, 2018T110814) MOE
(Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social
Sciences (No. 16YJC630131), National Natural Science Foundation of
China (No. 71601151).
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