LCP-Nets: A Linguistic Approach for Non-functional Preferences in a Semantic SOA Environment

This paper addresses the problem of expressing preferences among nonfunctional properties of services in a web service architecture. in such a context, semantic and non-functional annotations are required on service declarations and business process calls to services in order to select the best available service for each invocation. to cope with these multi-criteria decision problems, conditional and unconditional preferences are managed using a new variant of conditional preference networks (cpnets), taking into account uncertainty related to the preferences to achieve a better satisfaction rate. this variant, called lcp-nets, uses fuzzy linguistic information inside the whole process, from preference elicitation to outcome query computation, a qualitative approach that is more suitable to business process programmers. indeed, in lcp-nets, preference variables and utilities take linguistic values while conditional preference tables are considered as fuzzy rules which interdependencies may be complex. the expressiveness of the graphical model underlying cp-nets provides for solutions to gather all the preferences under uncertainty and to tackle interdependency problems. lcp-nets are applied to the problem of selecting the best service among a set of offers, given their dynamic non-functional properties. the implementation of lcp-nets is presented step-by-step through a real world example.