In today’s Web, Web services are created and updated on the fly. It’s already beyond the human ability to analysis them and generate the composition plan manually. A number of approaches have been proposed to tackle that problem. Most of them are inspired by the researches in cross-enterprise workflow and AI planning. This paper gives an overview of recent research efforts of automatic Web service composition both from the workflow and AI planning research community.

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A survey of automated web service composition methods

http://www.wsmo.org/papers/publications/wsmf.paper.pdf

The Web Service Modeling Framework WSMF

The Internet is going through several major changes. It has become a vehicle of Web services rather than just a repository of information. Many organizations are putting their core business competencies on the Internet as a collection of Web services. An important challenge is to integrate them to create new value-added Web services in ways that could never be foreseen forming what is known as Business-to-Business (B2B) services. Therefore, there is a need for modeling techniques and tools for reliable Web service composition. In this paper, we propose a Petri net-based algebra, used to model control flows, as a necessary constituent of reliable Web service composition process. This algebra is expressive enough to capture the semantics of complex Web service combinations.

A Petri net-based model for web service composition

Service composition is gaining momentum as the potential silver bullet for the envisioned Semantic Web. It purports to take the Web to unexplored efficiencies and provide a flexible approach for promoting all types of activities in tomorrow’s Web. Applications expected to heavily take advantage of Web service composition include B2B E-commerce and E-government. To date, enabling composite services has largely been an ad hoc, time-consuming, and error-prone process involving repetitive low-level programming. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based framework for the automatic composition of Web services. We present a technique to generate composite services from high-level declarative descriptions. We define formal safeguards for meaningful composition through the use of composability rules. These rules compare the syntactic and semantic features of Web services to determine whether two services are composable. We provide an implementation using an E-government application offering customized services to indigent citizens. Finally, we present an exhaustive performance experiment to assess the scalability of our approach.

/pdf/composing-web-services-on-the-semantic-web-3cmn2tc9ha.pdf

Composing Web services on the Semantic Web

E-Services are typically delivered point-to-point. However, the e-service environment creates the opportunity for providing value-added, integrated services, which are delivered by composing existing e-services. In order to enable organizations to pursue this business opportunity we have developed eFlow, a system that supports the specification, enactment, and management of composite e-services, modeled as processes that are enacted by a service process engine. Composite e-services have to cope with a highly dynamic business environment in terms of services and service providers. In addition, the increased competition forces companies to provide customized services to better satisfy the needs of every individual customer. Ideally, service processes should be able to transparently adapt to changes in the environment and to the needs of different customers with minimal or no user intervention. In addition, it should be possible to dynamically modify service process definitions in a simple and effective way to manage cases where user intervention is indeed required. In this paper we show how eFlow achieves these goals.

/pdf/adaptive-and-dynamic-service-composition-in-eflow-301mxt3zek.pdf

Adaptive and Dynamic Service Composition in eFlow

Multi-enterprise processes (MEPs) are workflows consisting of a set of activities that are implemented by different enterprises Tightly coupled Virtual Enterprises (VEs) typically agree on abstract MEPs (reference MEPs), to which each enterprise contributes single-enterprise processes (SEPs) that implement and refine the activities in the reference MEP On the other end of the spectrum, loosely coupled VEs use service-based MEPs that fuse together heterogeneous services implemented and provided by different enterprises Existing process models usually couple activities with their implementation Therefore, they cannot effectively support such MEPs In this paper, we introduce a Polymorphic Process Model (PPM) that supports both reference process- and service-based MEPs To accomplish this, PPM decouples activity interface from activity implementation, and provides process polymorphism to support their mapping In particular, PPM determines activity types from the activity interfaces, permits activity interface subtyping, and provides for the mapping of MEP activity types to concrete implementations via interface matching We illustrate that these key PPM capabilities permit the late binding and use of multiple activity implementations within a MEP without modifying the MEP at run time or enumerating the alternative implementation at specification time

/pdf/modeling-and-composing-service-based-nd-reference-process-5a8uqqndra.pdf

Modeling and Composing Service-Based nd Reference Process-Based Multi-enterprise Processes

Processes for crisis mitigation must permit coordination flexibility and dynamic change to empower crisis mitigation coordinators and experts to deal with unexpected situations. However, such mitigation processes must also provide enough structure to prevent chaotic response and increase mitigation effectiveness. Such combination of structure and flexibility cannot be effectively supported by existing workflow or groupware technologies. In this paper, we introduce the Collaboration Management Infrastructure (CMI) and describe its capabilities for supporting crisis mitigation processes. CMI provides a comprehensive Collaboration Management Model (CMM) and a corresponding federated system. CMM supports process templates that provide the initial activities, control and data flow structure, and resources needed to start mitigating a variety of crisis situations. In the event of a crisis, the appropriate process template is selected and instantiated. Crisis mitigation is achieved by escalating the instantiated process template. Escalation involves selecting and adding new process templates, creating new activities, roles, and task forces as needed to deal with the current demands in the crisis, and delegating responsibilities to process participants and task forces. CMM provides advanced composable primitives that empower crisis mitigation coordinators and experts to escalate the process. We provide an overview of the implementation of a federated CMI system and discuss our initial experience with various applications in the area of crisis management.

Managing escalation of collaboration processes in crisis mitigation situations

The Collaboration Management lnfrastructure (CMI) has been developed at MCC to manage collaboration processes in both traditional and virtual enterprises, and to provide combined process and situation awareness CMI technology development is driven by the requirements of many advanced applications provided by the companies that are members of the consortial CMI project Such advanced applications include crisis mitigation, command and control, logistics, and service provisioning in virtual enterprises These applications are not effectively supported by existing workflow and groupware technologies To address the requirements imposed by these applications CMI provides a sophisticated Collaboration Management Model (CMM) and a corresponding component-oriented system that implements the CMM CMM draws existing primitives from workflow and groupware models and introduces new primitives that address previously unsupported requirements of the CMI driver applications In this paper, a crisis mitigation application is presented that involves several process templates which are extended dynamically as details about the crisis become known

The collaboration management infrastructure

Process-based e-service integration.

Operation support systems (OSSs) integrate software components and network elements to automate the provisioning and monitoring of telecommunications services. This paper illustrates Telcordia's Cable OSS and shows how customers may use this OSS to provision IP and telephone services over the cable infrastructure. Telcordia's Cable OSS is a process-based application, i.e. a collection of flows, specialized components (e.g. a billing system, a call agent soft switch, network services and elements, cable modems, etc.) and corresponding adaptors that are integrated, coordinated and monitored using CMI (Collaboration Management Infrastructure), Telcordia's advanced process-based integration technology. Customers interact with the Cable OSS by using Web or IVR (interactive voice response) interfaces.

/pdf/advanced-process-based-component-integration-in-telcordia-s-2p0xr95ogk.pdf

D. Baker

Papers

Modeling and Composing Service-Based nd Reference Process-Based Multi-enterprise Processes

Managing escalation of collaboration processes in crisis mitigation situations

The collaboration management infrastructure

Process-based e-service integration.

Advanced process-based component integration in Telcordia's Cable OSS