Control Flow Requirements for Automated Service Composition

Automated composition of services is a key functionality for the adoption of the service-oriented development paradigm. Solving this problem in practice requires the ability to consider asynchronous stateful services and to express complex composition requirements which may span different phases of the life-cycle of component services. In this paper we present a novel automated service composition approach which addresses these challenges by associating so-called 'objects' to services, and by introducing a simple yet powerful notation to express composition requirements on them. We recast this view of the problem as a specific form of planning; our experiments on a prototype implementation witness the ability of our approach to deal with realistic scenarios and requirements that cannot be tackled by other current approaches.