Automatic composition of Web services with contingency plans

Abstract

The semantic Web technology and the Web services description language extensibility may be combined to describe services in an unambiguous and machine interpretable way, automating Web services discovery, selection and invocation. In this paper, we present an algorithm and a prototype for the automatic composition of Web services that implement workflows described in a high level language. Our approach has many advantages comparing to the manual creation of a simple program composition, such as smaller implementation time and cost, reliability with the generation of contingency plans, greater capacity to evolve with the dynamic service discovery, and faster execution time with the use of heuristics. We use the OWLS ontology to semantically describe Web services metadata and indexes to help selecting them. The proposed algorithm considers that equivalent services may have different interfaces and also respects preferences of the users.