Measuring Expected Integration Effort in Service Composition

Evaluating alternative solutions for service compositions is done by various properties, each requiring an associated evaluation measure. In this paper, we propose a new measure, namely integration effort, to capture the expected effort a human programmer is expected to invest in integrating composed services into a functioning process. We present several integration effort evaluation measures, which were adapted from the related research areas of schema and ontology matching. These measures are embedded in an extendible framework, allowing application in different levels of refinement. Our measures are empirically validated to be effective proxies of integration effort.