Automating the procurement of web services

Abstract

As government agencies and business become more dependent on web services, software solutions to automate their procurement gain importance. Current approaches for automating the procurement of web services suffer from an important drawback: neither uncertainty measures nor non-linear, and complex relations among parameters can be used by providers to specify quality-of-service in offers. In this paper, we look deeply into the roots of this drawback and present a proposal which overcomes it. The key point to achieve this improvement has been using the constraint programming as a formal basis, since it endows the model with a very powerful expressiveness. A XML-based implementation is presented along with some experimental results and comparisons with other approaches. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.