A bidirectional heuristic search technique for web service composition

Abstract

Automatic web services composition has recently received considerable attention from researchers in different fields. In this paper we propose a model based on web service dependency graph and a bidirectional heuristic search algorithm to find composite web services. The proposed algorithm is based on a new domain independent heuristic. Experiments on different types of dependency graphs of varying sizes and number of web services show promising results for the service composition model when compared to state-of-the-art search algorithms. The proposed dependency graph based composition model is, however, not limited to traditional web services but it can be extended to more general frameworks of collective systems where a global intelligent behavior emerges by a plurality of agents which interact composing different actions, services, or resources. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.