Product-line-based requirements customization for web service compositions

Customizing web services according to users’ individual functional and non-functional requirements has become increasingly difficult as the number of users increases. This paper introduces a new way to customize and verify composite web services by incorporating a software product-line engineering approach into web-service composition. The approach uses a partitioning similar to that between domain engineering and application engineering in the product-line context. It specifies the options that the user can select and constructs the resulting webservice compositions. By first creating a web-service composition search space that satisfies the common requirements and then querying the search space as the user selects values for the parameters of variation, we provide a more efficient way to customize web services. A decision model, illustrated with examples from an emergency-response application, is created to interact with the customers and ensure the consistency of their specifications. The capability to reuse the composition search space may also help improve the quality and reliability of the composite services and reduce the cost of re-verifying the same compositions.