Planning with Workflows - An Emerging Paradigm for Web Service Composition

In a previous work, we had analyzed the gaps in the prevalent approaches (i.e., Semantic Web Services and WSDLdescribed Web Services) for the problems of modeling, composing, executing, and verifying Web services, and derived challenges for the AI planning community. The challenges were in representation of complex actions, handling of richly typed messages, dynamic object creation and specification of multi-partner interactions. An important question that constantly arose was how the goals for automatic composition would be derived. In this paper, we revisit this issue in the light of new trends in software engineering towards Model Driven Architecture and early deployment of Web service composition solutions. We argue that Web services composition can not be seen as a one-shot plan synthesis problem defined with explicit goals but rather as a continual process of manipulating complex workflows, which requires to solve synthesis, execution, optimization, and maintenance problems as goals get incrementally refined. We then identify additional issues that become important in applying planning techniques.

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