An Approach to Temporal-Aware Procurement of Web Services

In the context of web service procurement (WSP), temporal– awareness refers to managing service demands and offers which are subject to validity periods, i.e. their evaluation depends not only on quality of service (QoS) values but also on time. For example, the QoS of some web services can be considered critical in working hours (9:00 to 17:00 from Monday to Friday) and irrelevant at any other moment. Until now, the expressiveness of such temporal–aware specifications has been quite limited. As far as we know, most proposals have considered validity periods to be composed of a single temporal interval. Other proposals, which could allow more expressive time–dependent specifications, have not performed a detailed study about all the underlying complexities of such approach, in spite of the fact that dealing with complex expressions on temporality is not a trivial task at all. As a matter of fact, it requires a special design of the so–called procurement tasks (consistency and conformance checking, and optimal selection). In this paper, we present a constraint–based approach to temporal–aware WSP. Using constraints allows a great deal of expressiveness, so that not only demands and offers can be assigned validity periods but also their conditions can be assigned (possibly multiple) validity temporal subintervals. Apart from revising the semantics of procurement tasks, which we previously presented in the first edition of the ICSOC conferences, we also introduce the notion of the covering set of a demand, a topic which is closely related to temporality.