Uncertain Composition of Web Services via Non-Deterministic Planning

Abstract

Web service composition (WSC) is the task of combining a set of single Web services together to create a more complex and cross-organizational composite service. Recently, many researchers have been done on WSC. However, most of these approaches did not take into account the inherent uncertainty of Web services that is the most important nature characteristic due to service deployment and invocation within a real and dynamic Internet environment. Therefore, this paper focuses on uncertain Web service composition (U-WSC) problem by three different non-deterministic effects of Web services. We proposed a comprehensive framework that models a U-WSC problem to a fully observable non-deterministic planning (FOND) problem using our automatic planning transition mechanism. The transformed uncertain planning problem can be solved by a highly efficient off-the-shelf non-deterministic planner which finds a plan to satisfy a composition request. We conducted some experiments based on a case study in an e-commerce application via an off-the-shelf non-deterministic planner called myND. The results of empirical experiments validate the feasibility of our proposed approach for dynamic composition of Web services with functional uncertainty.