Automatic Service Composition and Synthesis: the Roman Model

The promise of Web Service Computing is to use Web services as fundamental elements for realizing distributed applications/solutions. When no available service satisfies a desired specification, one might check whether (parts of) available services can be composed and orchestrated in order to realize the specification. The problem of automatic composition becomes especially interesting in the presence of conversational services. Among the various frameworks proposed in the literature, here we concentrate on the so called “Roman Model”, where: (i) each service is formally specified as a transition system that captures its possible conversations with a generic client; (ii) the desired specification is a target service, described itself as a transition system; (iii) the aim is to synthesize an orchestrator realizing the target service by exploiting execution fragments of available services. The Roman Model well exemplifies what can be achieved by composing conversational services and, also, uncovers relationships with automated synthesis of reactive processes in Verification and AI Planning.