A Survey on Service Composition Approaches: From Industrial Standards to Formal Methods

Composition of services has received much interest to support business-to-business and enterprise applications integration. The business world has developed a number of XML-based standards to formalize the specification of web services, their composition and their execution. On the other hand, the semantic web community focuses on reasoning about web resources by explicitly declaring their preconditions and effects with terms defined precisely in ontologies. Current service composition approaches range from practical languages aspiring to become industrial standards (e.g. BPEL and OWL-S) to more theoretical models and languages (e.g. automata, Petri nets, and process algebras). In this paper we present a survey of existing proposals for service composition and compare them among each other with respect to some key requirements. We hope this helps service composition designers and developers to focus their efforts and to deliver lasting solutions, while at the same time addressing the technology’s critical needs.