XSRL: An XML web-services request language

One of the most serious challenges that web-service enabled e-marketplaces face is the lack of formal support for expressing service requests against UDDI-resident web-services in order to solve a complex business problem. In this paper we present a web-service request language (XSRL) developed on the basis of AI planning and the XML database query language XQuery. This framework is designed to handle and execute XSRL requests and is capable of performing planning actions under uncertainty on the basis of refinement and revision as new service-related information is accumulated (via interaction with the user or UDDI) and as execution circumstances necessitate change

Constraint integration and violation handling for BPEL processes

Autonomic, i.e. dynamic and fault-tolerant Web service composition is a requirement resulting from recent developments such as on-demand services. In the context of planning-based service composition, multi-agent planning and dynamic error handling are still unresolved problems. Recently, business rule and constraint management has been looked at for enterprise SOA to add business flexibility. This paper proposes a constraint integration and violation handling technique for dynamic service composition. Higher degrees of reliability and fault-tolerance, but also performance for autonomously composed WS-BPEL processes are the objectives

Supporting adaptiveness of cyber-physical processes through action-based formalisms

Cyber Physical Processes (CPPs) refer to a new generation of business processes enacted in many application environments (e.g., emergency management, smart manufacturing, etc.), in which the presence of Internet-of-Things devices and embedded ICT systems (e.g., smartphones, sensors, actuators) strongly influences the coordination of the real-world entities (e.g., humans, robots, etc.) inhabitating such environments. A Process Management System (PMS) employed for executing CPPs is required to automatically adapt its running processes to anomalous situations and exogenous events by minimising any human intervention. In this paper, we tackle this issue by introducing an approach and an adaptive Cognitive PMS, called SmartPM, which combines process execution monitoring, unanticipated exception detection and automated resolution strategies leveraging on three well-established action-based formalisms developed for reasoning about actions in Artificial Intelligence (AI), including the situation calculus, IndiGolog and automated planning. Interestingly, the use of SmartPM does not require any expertise of the internal working of the AI tools involved in the system

Planning Technologies for the Web Environment: Perspectives and Research Issues

This work will explore and motivate perspectives and research issues related with the applications of automated planning technologies in order to support innovative web applications. The target for the technology transfer, i.e. the web, and, in a broader sense, the new Information Technologies (IT) is one of the most changing, evolving and hottest areas of current computer science. Nevertheless many sub-area in this field could have potential benefits from Planning and Scheduling (P&S) technologies, and, in some cases, technology transfer has already started. This paper will consider and explore a set of topics, guidelines and objectives in order to implement the technology transfer a new challenges, requirements and research issues for planning which emerge from the web and IT industry. Sample scenarios will be depicted to clarify the potential applications and limits of current planning technology. Finally we will point out some new P&S research challenge issues which are required to meet more advanced applicative goals

QoS-Aware Middleware for Web Services Composition

The paradigmatic shift from a Web of manual interactions to a Web of programmatic interactions driven by Web services is creating unprecedented opportunities for the formation of online Business-to-Business (B2B) collaborations. In particular, the creation of value-added services by composition of existing ones is gaining a significant momentum. Since many available Web services provide overlapping or identical functionality, albeit with different Quality of Service (QoS), a choice needs to be made to determine which services are to participate in a given composite service. This paper presents a middleware platform which addresses the issue of selecting Web services for the purpose of their composition in a way that maximizes user satisfaction expressed as utility functions over QoS attributes, while satisfying the constraints set by the user and by the structure of the composite service. Two selection approaches are described and compared: one based on local (task-level) selection of services and the other based on global allocation of tasks to services using integer programming

A planning approach to the automated synthesis of template-based process models

The design-time specification of flexible processes can be time-consuming and error-prone, due to the high number of tasks involved and their context-dependent nature. Such processes frequently suffer from potential interference among their constituents, since resources are usually shared by the process participants and it is difficult to foresee all the potential tasks interactions in advance. Concurrent tasks may not be independent from each other (e.g., they could operate on the same data at the same time), resulting in incorrect outcomes. To tackle these issues, we propose an approach for the automated synthesis of a library of template-based process models that achieve goals in dynamic and partially specified environments. The approach is based on a declarative problem definition and partial-order planning algorithms for template generation. The resulting templates guarantee sound concurrency in the execution of their activities and are reusable in a variety of partially specified contextual environments. As running example, a disaster response scenario is given. The approach is backed by a formal model and has been tested in experiment

A Framework for Semi-automated Web Service Composition in Semantic Web

Number of web services available on Internet and its usage are increasing very fast. In many cases, one service is not enough to complete the business requirement; composition of web services is carried out. Autonomous composition of web services to achieve new functionality is generating considerable attention in semantic web domain. Development time and effort for new applications can be reduced with service composition. Various approaches to carry out automated composition of web services are discussed in literature. Web service composition using ontologies is one of the effective approaches. In this paper we demonstrate how the ontology based composition can be made faster for each customer. We propose a framework to provide precomposed web services to fulfil user requirements. We detail how ontology merging can be used for composition which expedites the whole process. We discuss how framework provides customer specific ontology merging and repository. We also elaborate on how merging of ontologies is carried out.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figures; CUBE 2013 International Conferenc