A Hybrid Whale Optimization Algorithm for Quality of Service-Aware Manufacturing Cloud Service Composition

Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) has attracted lots of attention from scholars and practitioners. The purpose of quality of service (QoS)-aware manufacturing cloud service composition (MCSC), as one of the key issues in CMfg, is to combine different available manufacturing cloud services (MCSs) to generate an optimized MCSC that can meet the diverse requirements of customers. However, many available MCSs, deployed in the CMfg platform, have the same function but different QoS attributes. It is a great challenge to achieve optimal MCSC with a high QoS. In order to obtain better optimization results efficiently for the QoS-MCSC problems, a whale optimization algorithm (WOA) with adaptive weight, Lévy flight, and adaptive crossover strategies (ASWOA) is proposed. In the proposed ASWOA, adaptive crossover inspired by the genetic algorithm is developed to balance exploration and exploitation. The Lévy flight is designed to expand the search space of the WOA and accelerate the convergence of the WOA with adaptive crossover. The adaptive weight is developed to extend the search scale of the exploitation. Simulation and comparison experiments are conducted on various benchmark functions and different scale QoS-MCSC problems. The QoS attributes of the problems are randomly and symmetrically generated. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ASWOA outperforms other compared cutting-edge algorithms.