Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Service Oriented Evolutionary Algorithms P. Garc´ ıa-S´ anchez · J. Gonz´ alez · P. A. Castillo · M. G. Arenas · J. J. Merelo Received: date / Accepted: date Abstract This work presents a Service Oriented Ar- chitecture for Evolutionary Algorithms (SOA-EA), and an implementation of this architecture using a specific technology (called OSGiLiath). Service Oriented Archi- tecture is a computational paradigm where users inter- act using services to increase the integration between systems. The presented abstract architecture is formed by loosely coupled, highly configurable and language- independent services. As an example of an implemen- tation of this architecture, a complete process devel- opment using a specific service oriented technology is explained. With this implementation, less effort than classical development in integration, distribution mech- anisms and execution time management has been at- tained. In addition, steps, ideas, advantages and disad- vantages, and guidelines to create service oriented evo- lutionary algorithms are presented. Using existing soft- ware, or from scratch, researchers can create services to increase the interoperability in this area. Keywords Evolutionary Algorithms · Service Ori- ented Architecture · Service Oriented Science · Web Services · Interoperability · Distributed computing 1 Introduction Research in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) (Pa- pazoglou and van den Heuvel, 2007) is an emerging field, as can be seen in Figure 1, obtained from the search terms “service oriented OR service-oriented” in P. Garc´ ıa-S´ anchez Dept. of Computer Architecture and Computer Technology, E.T.S. Ing. Inform´ atica y Telecomunicaci´ on and CITIC-UGR University of Granada, Granada, Spain E-mail: pgarcia@atc.ugr.es Fig. 1 Number of published papers (per year) about SOA (obtained from Scopus database) the Scopus 1 database. Each year more papers about the area are published. This area seeks to promote ser- vices usage and adoption, and to improve the way to use them. For example, solving a problem combining existing services in an automatic way (Moussa et al., 2010). Service Oriented Architecture is a computational paradigm where the users interact with each other us- ing the concept of service. A service is a distributed entity (such as node, program, function), used to ob- tain a result, increasing the integration of heteroge- neous systems (several operating systems, protocols or languages) due to this multi-platform nature. The ser- vice users do not need to know the language used to implement the service, and they are not forced to use a specific technology to access that service. For example, an evolutionary algorithms researcher could have access to a fitness function made publicly available by another researcher at the other side of the world without even 1 http://www.scopus.com