An Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm Based Optimization Method for Service Network Customization

This paper presents an artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm based method for customizing an existing service network (SN). Service network is a complex network composed of a set of service components and the input-output relationships between them, and it has the powerful capacity of being customized to fulfill different personalized customer requirements. There might be multiple customized solutions in terms of one requirement, and different solution has varied usage cost, therefore to find the optimal one with minimal cost is necessary. Because it is a NP-hard problem, we propose an optimization method based on ABC algorithm, where a food source represents one solution (a sub network), and the optimization goal is to minimize the cost under the constraints of total response time and reliability raised by the customer. The optimal solution is found based on the group intelligence of bees. Experiment results demonstrate the ABC algorithm can quickly find the optimal customized solution.