Evolutionary algorithms for abstract planning

Abstract

The paper presents a new approach based on evolutionary algorithms to an abstract planning problem, which is the first stage of the web service composition problem. An abstract plan is defined as an equivalence class of sequences of service types that satisfy a user query. Two sequences are equivalent if they are composed of the same service types, but not necessarily occurring in the same order. The objective of our genetic algorithm (GA) is to return representatives of abstract plans without generating all the equivalent sequences. Experimental results are presented and compared with these obtained using an SMT-solver, showing that GA finds solutions for very large sets of service types in a reasonable and shorter time. © 2014 Springer-Verlag.