Speeding up adaptation of web service compositions using expiration times

Web processes must often operate in volatile environments where the quality of service parameters of the participating service providers change during the life time of the process. In order to remain optimal, the Web process must adapt to these changes. Adaptation requires knowledge about the parameter changes of each of the service providers and using this knowledge to determine whether the Web process should make a different more optimal decision. Previously, we defined a mechanism called the value of changed information which measures the impact of expected changes in the service parameters on the Web process, thereby offering a way to query and incorporate those changes that are useful and cost-efficient. However, computing the value of changed information incurs a substantial computational overhead. In this paper, we use service expiration times obtained from pre-defined service level agreements to reduce the computational overhead of adaptation. We formalize the intuition that services whose parameters have not expired need not be considered for querying for revised information. Using two realistic scenarios, we illustrate our approach and demonstrate the associated computational savings.