TripICS - a Web Service Composition System for Planning Trips and Travels (extended abstract)

Automatic composition of Web services is a very active area of research which has provided a lot of important results [10, 1, 15, 6] as well as many implemented approaches [11, 12, 2, 3, 13]. In this paper we present the system TripICS a real-life application of our Web service composition system PlanICS [8, 9, 13] to planning trips and travels around the world. While there are systems offering some support for planning excursions and travels [4, 5], our system uses advanced automated concrete planning methods [13, 16, 14]. TripICS is a specialization of the concrete planning viewed as a constrained optimization problem to the ontology containing services provided by hotels, airlines, railways, museums etc. The system finds an optimal plan (solution) satisfying the requirements of the user by applying the most efficient concrete planners of PlanICS based on a combination of an SMT-solver [7] with the nature inspired algorithm: GA, SA, and GEO [16, 14]. Contrary to PlanICS, the first phase of planning, called abstract planning, is realized by TripICS in a semi-automatic way by giving the user a possibility to choose the elements of an abstract plan using a Graphical User Interface (GUI). In the remainder we present: the description of the system TripICS, the theory behind it, and the implementation followed by some experimental results and conclusions.