Although the benefits of reusing services have been widely acknowledged, composing existing services to realize different user requirements is still a difficult and time consuming task. There have been research works on workflow templates and service design patterns that offer a higher level of reuse and assist in the composition process. Yet existing workflow templates are too specific and service design patterns may be too abstract and their effectiveness in assisting the composition process may be limited. In this dissertation, we propose a comprehensive service pattern model that is more flexible than existing workflow/service templates while allowing systematic instantiation into some concrete workflows. The service pattern supports flow control, abstract services, and prospect services (similar to a node in a design pattern). Also, we develop a set of reasoning rules to automatically verify and determine the assignment of instantiation parameters in service pattern. In addition, recent research into automated Web service composition focuses on control flow specification and enforcement. Traditionally, message mismatch between Web services appears as an orthogonal problem that can be solved using XML-based query languages. This study instead considers Web service composition and message manipulation holistically to support greater optimization of Web service composition. A proposed model, the WS-data model, focuses on data exchanges in composing Web services. Several operators with varying properties can be used to compose Web services and manipulate their input and output data. Experiments conducted on the Amazon Cloud platform show that these operators¡¦ properties can be used to develop a more efficient way for realizing a complex task, expressed according to the proposed WS-data model. It is hoped that the proposed models and automated reasoning of instantiation parameters assignment will realize the benefits of SOA in the real business settings.

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Submitted by Pedro Henrique Rodrigues (pedro.henriquer@ufpe.br) on 2015-03-05T19:29:15Z No. of bitstreams: 2 phd-thesis-vfinal-rasd.pdf: 2993974 bytes, checksum: a924d1ac8059a7b4a6c2775d60d5a742 (MD5) license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-05T19:29:15Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 phd-thesis-vfinal-rasd.pdf: 2993974 bytes, checksum: a924d1ac8059a7b4a6c2775d60d5a742 (MD5) license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-03-13 / Service Composition is one of the most important features offered by Service Oriented Computing. The composition allows a new service to be created through the reuse of existing ones. The process of creating a composition involves discovering the necessary services and combining them in an appropriate manner using specific languages and tools. This process, however, is still carried out mainly by hand. Considering the dynamic nature of distributed services, manual composition may become too complex, affecting the productivity gains provided by reuse. Proposals to fully or partially automate this process already exist, most of them based on Automated Planning algorithms borrowed from Artificial Intelligence. Although functional, these approaches have practical problems that hinder their effective implementation in production scenarios. In this Thesis, we addressed some of the practical problems of automated composition, starting with the need for formal descriptions of services. These formal descriptions are necessary for the composition algorithms, however, are rarely available from services. This issue was addressed by means of reverse engineering a repository of service compositions. By analyzing how the services were related to each other in the compositions, it was possible to obtain the necessary information for the algorithms to work. We also evaluated the quality of the compositions generated by the algorithms and their similarity with respect to compositions created manually. Automated Planning algorithms from the literature have been modified in order to generate solutions closer to those expected by the developer. Finally, the composition algorithms were adapted to accept incomplete specifications, thus allowing the developer to obtain a solution even not knowing a priori all the composition details. Comparisons with automated planning tools were conducted in order to ascertain the effectiveness of the algorithms. The results show that the automated composition, as presented in the Thesis, can be an invaluable tool to the service developer.

In this dissertation, we present a novel approach for the automatic composition of Web services on the envisioned Semantic Web. Automatic service composition requires dealing with three major research thrusts: semantic description of Web services, composability of participant services, and generation of composite service descriptions. This dissertation deals with the aforementioned research issues. We first propose an ontology-based framework for organizing and describing semantic Web services. We introduce the concept of community to cluster Web services based on their domain of interest. Each community is defined as an instance of an ontology called community ontology. We then propose a composability model to check whether semantic Web services can be combined together, hence avoiding unexpected failures at run time. The model defines formal safeguards for meaningful composition through the use of composability rules. We also introduce the notions of composability degree and tau-composability to cater for partial and total composability. Based on the composability model, we propose a set of algorithms that automatically generate detailed descriptions of composite services from high-level specifications of composition requests. We introduce a Quality of Composition (QoC) model to assess the quality of the generated composite services. The techniques presented in this dissertation are implemented in WebDG, a prototype for accessing e-government Web services. Finally, we conduct an extensive performance study (analytical and experimental) of the proposed composition algorithms. / Ph. D.

Service composition is a process by which the services offered by devices may be combined to produce new, more complex services. In a pervasive computing environment where many devices exist and offer services, it is particularly desirable to fully automate this composition so end users do not need to be technically sophisticated. Earlier work done by Pourreza introduced a system to do fully automated service composition and to rank the services so produced by order of expected usefulness to the end user(s). My thesis research extends the work done by Pourreza in two ways. First, and most importantly, it adds support for services that have associated Quality of Service (QoS) characteristics. This allows me to ensure that I only generate composite services that are compatible in terms of the provided and required QoS characteristics of their component services. Further, it allows me to rank the generated composite services based on how well they meet the desired QoS preferences of users. Second, I extend Pourreza’s work by adding support for compositions involving services from outside a persistent computing environment (e.g. those provided via available Internet or 3G network access). I have built a prototype for the system to illustrate feasibility and to assess the overhead of supporting QoS in composition. I have also developed a regression model (based on collected user input regarding QoS preferences for services) that can be used to effectively rank compositions based on QoS for a variety of persistent environments. My results show that my approach is both feasible and effective.

Service composition is a process by which the services offered by devices may be combined to produce new, more complex services. In a pervasive computing environment where many devices exist and offer services, it is particularly desirable to fully automate this composition so end users do not need to be technically sophisticated. Earlier work done by Pourreza introduced a system to do fully automated service composition and to rank the services so produced by order of expected usefulness to the end user(s). My thesis research extends the work done by Pourreza in two ways. First, and most importantly, it adds support for services that have associated Quality of Service (QoS) characteristics. This allows me to ensure that I only generate composite services that are compatible in terms of the provided and required QoS characteristics of their component services. Further, it allows me to rank the generated composite services based on how well they meet the desired QoS preferences of users. Second, I extend Pourreza’s work by adding support for compositions involving services from outside a persistent computing environment (e.g. those provided via available Internet or 3G network access). I have built a prototype for the system to illustrate feasibility and to assess the overhead of supporting QoS in composition. I have also developed a regression model (based on collected user input regarding QoS preferences for services) that can be used to effectively rank compositions based on QoS for a variety of persistent environments. My results show that my approach is both feasible and effective.

As the emergence of SOA concept, web services has became a key technology to achieve the seamless system interoperability and collaborations with enterprises partners. Since many available web services provide overlapping or identical functionality, when it comes to composing a composite web service, a choice needs to be made for selecting an appropriate component web service. Dynamic web service selection refers to determining a subset of component web services to be invoked so as to orchestrate a composite web service. Previous work in web service selection usually assumes the invocations of web service operations to be independent of on another. But this assumption however does not hold in practice as both the composite and component web services often impose some orderings on the invocation of their operations to represent its business logic. Such orderings constrain the selection of component web services to orchestrate the composite web service. We therefore propose to use finite state machine (FSM) to model the invocation order of web service operations. We define a measure, called aggregated reliability, to measure the probability that a given state in the composite web service will lead to successful execution in the context where each component web service may fail with some probability. We show that the computation of aggregated reliability is equivalent to eigenvector computation. We also propose two strategies to select component web services that are likely to successfully complete the execution of a given sequence of operations. For our approach to work in a practical environment, the dominating composition language BPEL for specifying the operation invocation orders will be transformed into an abstract FSM. We also proposed a prototype for realizing our dynamic WS selection. Our experiments on a generated set of web service operation sequences show that our proposed strategies perform better than two baseline selection strategies.

As the Internet becomes more pervasive, the content and services are increasing in quantity as well as improving in quality. This trend is fostered by the advancement of technologies, such as RESTful services, Web 2.0, and Mashups. Service composition integrates services to fulfill specific tasks using a set of tools. The existing service composition techniques and tools are mainly designed for the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) professionals. The business processes used in the service composition systems are primarily designed by business analysts who have extensive process knowledge. Due to the lack of process knowledge, novice business analysts and end users face challenge to identify and orchestrate service into a well-defined business process. Even for the experienced users, it is challenging to select appropriate services from a set of functionally similar services as the quality information of services may not be available. In this thesis, we propose a framework that allows a non-technical user to combine web services to achieve a goal. Our approach helps users to find the process knowledge from the web. We index web services based on the semantic concepts available in the service description documents and help users to formulate a web service search query. We use online reviews to choose a web service from a set of functionally similar web services. Our approach automatically finds the data flow between web services and generates a user interface to execute a composite service. The effectiveness of our proposed approaches is demonstrated through a series of case studies. The results of our case studies show that our approaches for process knowledge extraction, service discovery, and service selection make it easier for people with less technical knowledge to compose services. / Thesis (Ph.D, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2014-06-30 15:18:28.155

As the Web Services proliferate and complicate it is becoming an overwhelming job to manually prepare the Web Service Compositions which describe the communication and integration between Web Services. This thesis analyzes the usage of Event Calculus, which is one of the logical action-effect definition languages, for the automated preparation and execution of Web Service Compositions. In this context, planning capabilities of Event Calculus are utilized. Translations from Planning Domain Description Language and DARPA Agent Markup Language to Event Calculus are provided to show that Web Services can be composed with the help of Event Calculus. Also comparisons between Event Calculus and other planning languages used for the same purposes are presented.

With service interaction modelling, it is customary to distinguish between two types of models: choreographies and orchestrations. A choreography describes interactions within a collection of services from a global perspective, where no service plays a privileged role. Instead, services interact in a peer-to-peer manner. In contrast, an orchestration describes the interactions between one particular service, the orchestrator, and a number of partner services. The main proposition of this work is an approach to bridge these two modelling viewpoints by synthesising orchestrators from choreographies. To start with, choreographies are defined using a simple behaviour description language based on communicating finite state machines. From such a model, orchestrators are initially synthesised in the form of state machines. It turns out that state machines are not suitable for orchestration modelling, because orchestrators generally need to engage in concurrent interactions. To address this issue, a technique is proposed to transform state machines into process models in the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN). Orchestrations represented in BPMN can then be augmented with additional business logic to achieve value-adding mediation. In addition, techniques exist for refining BPMN models into executable process definitions. The transformation from state machines to BPMN relies on Petri nets as an intermediary representation and leverages techniques from theory of regions to identify concurrency in the initial Petri net. Once concurrency has been identified, the resulting Petri net is transformed into a BPMN model. The original contributions of this work are: an algorithm to synthesise orchestrators from choreographies and a rules-based transformation from Petri nets into BPMN.