A monolithic approach to automated composition of semantic web services with the Event Calculus

In this paper, a web service composition and execution framework is presented for semantically -annotated web services. A monolithic approach to automated web service composition and execution problem is chosen, which provides some benefits by separating composition and execution phases. An AI planning method using a logical formalism, namely Abductive Event Calculus, is chosen for the composition phase. This formalism allows one to generate a narrative of actions and temporal orderings using abductive planning techniques given a goal. The functional properties of services, namely input/output/precondition/effects (IOPE) are taken into consideration in the composition phase and non-functional properties, namely Quality of Service (QoS) parameters are used in selecting the most appropriate solution to be executed. The repository of OWL-S semantic web services are translated to the Event Calculus axioms and the resulting plans found by the Abductive Event Calculus Planner are converted to graphs. These graphs can be sorted according to a score calculated using the defined quality of service parameters of the atomic services in the composition to determine the optimal solution. The selected graph is converted to an OWL-S file which is executed consequently.     

Quality-of-service oriented web service composition algorithm and planning architecture

In the next few decades, it is expected that web services will proliferate, many web services will offer the same services, and the clients will demand more value added and informative services rather than those offered by single, isolated web services. As the result, the problem of synthesizing web services of high quality will be raised as a prominent issue. The clients will face the trouble of choosing or creating composition plans, among numerous possible plans, that satisfy their quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. Typical QoS properties associated with a web service are the execution cost and time, availability, successful execution rate, reputation, and usage frequency. In engineering perspective, generating the composition plan that fulfills a client’s QoS requirement is a time-consuming optimization problem. To resolve the problem in a timely manner, we propose a constraint satisfaction based web service composition algorithm that combines tabu search and simulated annealing meta-heuristics. As an implementation framework of the algorithm, we suggest a QoS-oriented web service composition planning architecture. The architecture maintains expert made composition schemas in a service category and assists the client as pure user to choose the one he/she wants to use. The main modules of the architecture are composition broker and execution plan optimizer. With the aid of the UDDI server, the composition broker discovers candidate outsourced web services for each atomic process of the selected schema and gathers QoS information on the web services. After that, the execution plan optimizer runs the web service composition algorithm in order to generate a QoS-oriented composition plan. The performance of the algorithm was tested in a simulated environment.     

Fuzzy sets and similarity relations for semantic web service matching

Semantic Web Services (SWS) were introduced to facilitate the publication, discovery, and execution of web services. A semantic matchmaker enhances the capability of UDDI service registries in the SWS architecture and it is able to recognize various degrees of matching for web services. On the basis of SWS and fuzzy-set theory, a fuzzy matching approach for semantic web services is proposed, to support a more automated and veracious service discovery process.     

基于Agent的语义web服务发现模型研究

Web服务发现是Web服务系统架构的重要部分,现有的主流Web服务发现方法采用基于UDDI框架的服务匹配。针对现有服务发现模型缺乏对语义信息的支持和发现精确程度不高的问题,本文在讨论Agent技术与语义Web服务技术的基础上,提出了一个基于Agent的语义Web服务发现模型,使服务发现的过程更加智能,也提高了服务发现的精确度,并设计了一个原型系统来验证所提出的服务发现方法的可行性。     

Facilitating Service Discovery with Semantic Overlay

Service Oriented Architecture （SOA） and Peer-to-Peer （P2P） computing share many common characteristics. It is believed that the combination of the two emerging techniques is a very promising method in promoting the web services （WS）. Because the service discovery plays a key role in the integration, here a P2P-based framework to manage the knowledge of service and locating services is proposed. In this paper, the details of the principle, constructing and maintaining of service semantic overlay architecture have been described, and the way how the semantic overlay facilitates discovery of service resources is illustrated. To enable the semantic web service superiority, Service Ontology, which is considered as the service semantic model, is employed to depict service. The service discovery includes two phases： searching on the service semantic overlay; and local discovery in peer＇s service repository. Various solutions have been proposed to realize those two phases. Furthermore, tests are carried out to evaluate service discovery on the architecture.     

语义网服务中的本体综述

作为实现下一代Web的集成方案,语义网服务将语义Web技术和Web服务技术相结合,以支持Web服务的自动发现、选择、合成和执行.本体是语义网服务的理论基础.介绍了Web资源描述本体OWL和Web服务描述本体的概况,并对3种主流的Web服务语义描述框架进行对比分析,为语义网服务中本体的创建提供基础知识.研究了语义网服务中存在的各层次的本体异构问题,明确了语义网服务中本体集成的主要研究方向.     

Web Service Diagnoser Model for managing faults in web services

Reliability is an important criterion to facilitate extensive deployment of web service technology for commercial business applications. Run-time monitoring and fault management of web services are essential to ensure uninterrupted and continuous availability of web services. This paper presents WISDOM (Web Service Diagnoser Model) a generic architecture for detecting faults during execution of web services. Policies have been proposed to describe the intended behavior of web services and faulty behavior would be detected as deviations or inconsistencies with respect to the specified behavior. The model proposes the use of monitoring components in service registries and service providers to detect run-time faults during publishing, discovery, binding and execution of web services. An independent fault diagnoser is proposed to coordinate the individual monitoring components and also act as a repository for the specified web service policies. The proposed model has been tested with a sample web service application and the results obtained are presented.     

Meta web service: building web-based open decision support system based on web services

Web services are currently one of the trends in network-based business services, which intuitively will be applied to build a semantic web-based decision support system (DSS). Since web services are self-contained, modular business process applications, based on open standards, enable integration models for facilitating program-to-program interactions. Decision modules in a semantic web-based DSS can be viewed as a web service. However, according to the current features, web services know only about themselves, they are neither autonomous, nor are they designed to use ontologies; they are passive until invoked, and they do not provide for composing functionalities. These lead to the motivation on building a sophisticated web service to contain these features and to utilize web services on behalf of the user. This paper aims to propose a new concept of Meta Web Service, a web service-based DSS. The meta web service understands the user's problem statement with ontology, performs web service discovery, web service composition, and automatically generates codes for composite web service execution. Case-based reasoning is applied to quickly find past histories of successful service compositions. A prototype of research web service has been developed to show the feasibility of the proposed idea.     

智能服务——Web服务和语义Web集成研究

现有Web主要是为人使用Web上的内容设计,如何自动发现、执行、组合及互操作Web上的信息,提供智能服务,是Web服务努力的方向,Web服务虽然也制定了发现、描述、信息交换的标准,但这些标准不支持智能服务,其原因是现有Web服务缺乏清楚的语义标记,该文提出将语义Web技术和Web服务结合来实现智能服务的思想,即为Web服务增加语义标记以实现Web服务的智能性,并就其可行性进行了阐述,最后给出了具体实现的方法。     

An experience report on developing an automated web services platform

Web services have attracted significant industry interest as a low-cost and flexible technology alternative to distributed object and proprietary message-oriented methods for delivery of on-demand business processes, enabling intra-organizational systems integration, and in the long term, development of dynamic inter-organizational process networks that may revolutionize B2C and B2B e-commerce. Exploiting this latent potential of web services technology requires the development of automated techniques for scalable and reliable service composition and execution in web service platforms. In this paper, we summarize our experience in developing an architectural framework for web services platforms, called Integrated Service Planning and Execution architecture (ISP & E). The use of recent advances in AI planning, learning and semantic web technologies for service composition, reliable service execution, transaction synthesis, and model-driven deployment of services is discussed. Furthermore, we discuss implications for and research issues in the development of web services based systems to aid e-business.     

A simulation-based approach for dynamic process management at web service platforms

Web services technology is being adopted as a viable deployment approach for future distributed software systems that enable business-to-business and business-to-consumer interactions across the open and dynamic internet environment. Recent research is focused on developing support technologies for web service discovery, on-demand service composition, and robust execution to facilitate web services based deployment of business processes. Developing techniques to cope with the volatile and open nature of the web during execution of composite services at the service platform is essential for delivering reliable and acceptable performance in this new process delivery framework. In this paper, we propose a simulation-based framework to guide scheduling of composite service execution. Online simulation of the dynamics of the open environment is used for scheduling service requests at the service platform. Comparison of the look-ahead simulation for different scheduling policies with the current execution state provides guidelines for service execution in order to cope with system volatility. We have implemented a prototype of the proposed framework and illustrate the feasibility of our approach with experimental studies.     

Web服务核心支撑技术:研究综述

随着电子商务的迅速崛起,基于Web的应用模式迅速发展,Web应用从局部化发展到全球化,从B2C(business-to-customer)发展到B2B(business-to-business),从集中式发展到分布式,Web服务成为电子商务的有效解决方案.Web服务是一个崭新的分布式计算模型,是Web上数据和信息集成的有效机制.Web服务的新型构架,Web服务的高效执行方式,Web服务与其他成熟技术的有机结合以及Web服务的集成是解决现实应用问题的重要技术.从Web服务研究的不同侧面对其进行了综述,阐述了Web服务的基本概念,分析了当前Web服务的主要研究问题及其核心支撑技术,概括了Web服务中的数据集成技术、Web服务的组合、语义Web服务、Web服务发现,Web服务安全,P2P(Peer-to-Peer)新型计算环境下的Web服务解决方案和网格服务等方面的研究内容,并对这些技术进行了总结,结合已有的研究成果,展望了Web服务未来的研究方向及其面临的挑战.     

动态Web服务合成中的服务选择算法研究

为了提高服务合成效率并更好的适应动态变化的应用环境,提出了基于流程修改的服务合成方案,使得复合服务的执行与服务发现过程并行化。提出了基于QoS属性的服务选择算法,该算法能够实现服务执行时选择服务,在考虑综合QoS信息及时间因素的基础上,通过不断更新用户需求来进行服务选择,提高了服务合成效率。实验结果表明,该选择算法可以获得满足用户需求且最优的服务,很好的保证了服务的可靠执行。     

基于语义P2P的UDDI组合服务发现模型

随着Web服务数目的增长和对实时性需求的增加,单一集中式的UDDI服务注册中心难以满足实际需求,而基于某个领域的UDDI虽然查找迅速却难以满足所有用户的要求,于是如何组织一个逻辑上完整的服务注册中为Web服务应用的一个新研究方向.基于P2P的底部架构,将服务注册中心作为P2P网络内基本节点,提出了一个根据本体信息对服务注册节点进行语义分类查找的Web服务发现模型.在模型的基础上,提出了在P2P层支持语义的一种发现的方法.提出的Web服务发现模型既结合了集中式Web服务发现方式和分布式Web服务方式发现的优点,又创新性地在P2P发现方面加入了本体信息.     

An Intents-based approach for dynamic service discovery

Service discovery has been a very active research field attracting many researchers around the world. Most of the previous research efforts on service discovery have been based on the ternary classification of participant roles in web services, including service providers, brokers, and consumers. This classification is insufficient because it fails to make a difference between application developers and end users who both belong to service consumers. As a result, application developers usually take the responsibility of seeking services while end users who ultimately use the application are ignored. In order to address this issue, this paper presents an Intents-based approach for dynamic service discovery. The proposed approach is motivated from two industrial protocols: Android Intents and web Intents. It improves the two protocols by a generic model from the aspects of architecture, intent messages and their resolving process, Intents services, and user agents. It classifies the implicit intents into authoritative and naïve intents and is compatible with the current web service triangular architecture. This paper also illustrates a way of creating Intents services from SOAP and REST web services and presents two cases to demonstrate some benefits of the proposed approach.     

Web服务组合构建与执行的Petri网平台研究

针对Petri网在服务组合中的具体应用问题,尤其是如何构建基于Petri网的服务组合软件平台,在服务组合的Petri网模型的基础上,首先建立了具体领域中服务的语义功能体系;然后进行原子服务的注册及发布,将各具体服务绑定到语义功能体系中的某一功能;其次实现了基于视图的服务组合构建,用户可在相应视图中通过选择相应的功能进行方便的服务组合构建,并得到相应的服务组合功能流程;最后进一步将相关功能转换为绑定具体服务实例的Petri网模型,并交由相应的基于Petri网的服务组合执行引擎实现执行。实现了从服务组合构建到执行实现的完整功能流程,为基于Petri网的服务组合动态执行相关问题的分析提供了软件平台支撑。     

A UTP semantic model for Orc language with execution status and fault handling

The Orc language is a concurrency calculus proposed to study the orchestration patterns in service oriented computing. Its special features, such as high concurrency and asynchronism make it a brilliant subject for studying web applications that rely on web services. The conventional semantics for Orc does not contain the execution status of services so that a program cannot determine whether a service has terminated normally or halted with a failure after it published some results. It means that this kind of failure cannot be captured by the fault handler. Furthermore, such a semantic model cannot establish an order saying that a program is better if it fails less often. This paper employs UTP methods to propose a denotational semantic model for Orc that contains execution status information. A failure handling semantics is defined to recover a failure execution back to normal. A refinement order is defined to compare two systems based on their execution failures. Based on this order, a system that introduces a failure recovery mechanism is considered better than one without. An extended operational semantics is also proposed and proven to be equivalent to the denotational semantics.