Semantic Web Services Composition via Planning as Model Checking

The ability to automatically compose services is one essential aspect of service oriented architecture. It can reduce time and cost in development and maintenance of complex services and software systems. We are developing a technique to realize this aim by combining the “planning as model checking” approach with Semantic Web Service concepts. We have modified a current planning as model checking algorithm by using a bounded on-the-fly depth-first search algorithm. The result allows for service execution plans to be generated on the fly. One of the challenges is to model a web service as a state transition system. The approach will be suitable in the context of ontologies, but for now we are simply using dictionaries for mapping operations and parameters. The planning as model checking approach forms part of a larger framework to automatically compose services, which addresses several drawbacks of current composition approaches.