A Systematic Review of the Combinatorial Methods of Service Composition in the Cloud Computing ‎Environment

In the latest decade, the concept of service delivery and software-as-a-service have evolved into two important evolution paradigms which have affected the information systems area. A paradigm shift in software development has been triggered by this change, in which software is developed through the use of ready-made services in the cloud. Since service composition in the cloud environment must be done on-the-fly, realizing this requires a trade-off between the optimality of the composite service and the time it takes. As QoS-aware service composition has several potential solutions, some of which are usually considered optimal, which should be considered an NP-hard problem. A growing number of services leads to a larger problem search space, which is why in recent years many researchers have looked into methods that use meta-heuristic algorithms to solve the problem of service composition in a cloud environment. Thus, it is crucial that researchers have access to up-to-date and specialized review articles. Based on a systematic review of the research literature, the paper aims to extract important questions that are relevant to meta-heuristic QoS-aware service composition methods. Then, after classifying the studies and studying the proposed methods, goals, and priorities of researchers in articles, useful results and statistics for future research in this field are presented.