Web Service Candidate Identification Using the Firefly Algorithm

Identification of web service candidates in legacy software is a crucial process in the reengineering of legacy systems to service oriented architecture. Researchers have proposed various automatic and semi-automatic methods for this purpose, some of which have proved to be quite efficient, but there are still certain gaps which need to be addressed. This article discovers the strengths and weaknesses of previous methods and develops a method with improved service candidate identification performance. In this article, service identification is considered as a search and optimization problem and a firefly algorithm is developed accordingly to give high-quality solutions in reasonably short times. A filtering method is also developed to remove excess modules (false positives) from the algorithm outputs. A case study on a legacy flight reservation system demonstrates the high reliability of the outputs given by the proposed method.