Composing Distributed Data-intensive Web Services Using a Flexible
  Memetic Algorithm
  Web Service Composition (WSC) is a particularly promising application of Web
services, where multiple individual services with specific functionalities are
composed to accomplish a more complex task, which must fulfil functional
requirements and optimise Quality of Service (QoS) attributes, simultaneously.
Additionally, large quantities of data, produced by technological advances,
need to be exchanged between services. Data-intensive Web services, which
manipulate and deal with those data, are of great interest to implement
data-intensive processes, such as distributed Data-intensive Web Service
Composition (DWSC). Researchers have proposed Evolutionary Computing (EC)
fully-automated WSC techniques that meet all the above factors. Some of these
works employed Memetic Algorithms (MAs) to enhance the performance of EC
through increasing its exploitation ability of in searching neighbourhood area
of a solution. However, those works are not efficient or effective. This paper
proposes an MA-based approach to solving the problem of distributed DWSC in an
effective and efficient manner. In particular, we develop an MA that hybridises
EC with a flexible local search technique incorporating distance of services.
An evaluation using benchmark datasets is carried out, comparing existing
state-of-the-art methods. Results show that our proposed method has the highest
quality and an acceptable execution time overall.
