A Logic Framework for Flexible and Security-Aware Service Composition

Automatic service composition finds applicability in many different domains. Composition comes into play when a user's request cannot be fulfilled by a single software module, but the composition of multiple modules can provide the requested services. In many application domains it is important to be able to express QoS and security attributes associated with services and take them into account in the composition process. In this paper, we propose a general framework for module composition that offers all the aforementioned capabilities. In addition, our framework allows users to express both hard and soft requirements for the QoS and security attributes that should come with the requested services. We address the problem of composing modules so that the requested services can be provided with the best attribute provision w.r.t. to the user's specifications. We show that the problem is NP-hard. Finally, we propose a logic programming approach to express and solve the module composition problem.