Representing and simulating uncertainty of the quality of service of web services using fuzzy cognitive map approach

Abstract

Web services are growing rapidly to provide clients, either organizations or individuals, with multiple Internet services and to offer solutions for the integration of many applications. Quality of Service (QoS) of a Web service is the key consideration of both service providers and users. Thus, measuring the QoS requires, in addition to its normative requirements, engaging the views of clients and service providers and environmental factors. Human intervention and the environment may lead to uncertainty and result in uncertain factors in assessing QoS. In such a case, traditional computing and statistical techniques cannot provide an accurate representation of inherited uncertainties, especially when uncertain variables are connected with ambiguous (fuzzy) relationships. An alternative is to use a soft computing approach. This paper proposes a Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM) model as a soft computing approach that can represent and simulate the uncertainty of QoS. FCM represents the uncertain variables in the domain knowledge and their connections in the form of a signed directed graph consisting of nodes representing the variables and directed arrows representing the cause-effect relationships. In addition, it allows representing imprecise data either using numeric data, i.e. in the ranges [0, 1] and [-1, 1], or linguistic data, i.e., "low, medium, high". For calculations, FCM is converted to an adjacency matrix to find the effects of variables on each other. Scenario simulations can also be implemented to help decision makers to investigate appropriate outcomes. Finally, the proposed approach is tested by an experiment to demonstrate its reasonability and admissibility of the representation and simulation of the uncertainty of the QoS domain knowledge.