Goal-based business service composition

As organizations operate under a highly dynamic business world, they can only survive by optimizing their business processes (BPs) and outsourcing complementary functionality to their core business. To this end, they adopt service-orientation as the underlying mechanism enabling BP optimization and evolution. BPs are now seen as business services (BSs) that span organization boundaries and ought to satisfy cross-organizational objectives. As such, various BS design approaches have been proposed. However, these approaches cannot re-use existing business and software services (SSs) to realize the required BS functionality. Moreover, non-functional requirements and their impact on BS design are not considered. This research gap is covered by a novel, goal-oriented method able to discover those BS and SS compositions fulfilling the required BS functional and non-functional goals at both the business and IT level. This method coherently integrates the design steps involved and properly handles the lack of required BS components. It also advances the state-of-the-art in service composition by being able to both select the best composition plan and the best services realizing the plan tasks based on novel plan and service selection criteria.