Automated web services composition with iterated services

Abstract

In the last decade there has been a proliferation of web services based application systems. In some applications (e.g., e-commerce, weather forecast) a web service is invoked many times with different actual parameters to obtain a composed service. In this paper we introduce the notion of iterated services that are obtained from given atomic services by iteration. The iterated services provide compact and elegant solutions to such complex composition problems that are unsolvable using the existing approaches. We define a new service dependency graph model to capture web services with sets of objects as input/output. We give a translation of the web services composition problem to a planning problem. Finally, we transform a plan to a composed web service. We have implemented our approach using the BlackBox planner.