Assembling Composite Web Services From Autonomous Components

Web services are fast emerging as the technology of choice to build distributed information systems in multiple domains including e-Business and e-Science. An important challenge is to develop methodologies and tools that enable (semi-) automatic composition of services by taking into account the functional, non-functional and behavioral requirements of the service developer. This paper presents the fundamental concepts and issues related to service composition and provides a representative sample of existing work proposed by the AI planning and formal methods communities to address some of the challenges in service composition. It also provides a brief introduction to an iterative and incremental technique for modeling composite Web services proposed by the authors.