Web Service Discovery and Composition for Virtual Enterprises

One main characteristic of virtual enterprises are short-term collaborations between business partners to provide efficient and individualized services to customers. The MOVE project targets at a methodology and a software framework to support such flexible collaborations based on process oriented design and communication by Web services. MOVE’s framework supports the graphical design and verification of business processes, the execution and supervision of processes in transaction-oriented environment, and the dynamic composition and optimization of processes. A business process may be composed from a set of Web services, deployed itself as Web service and executed in the framework. The composition of processes from Web services is implemented with methods from AI-planning. We apply Answer Set Programming (ASP) and map Web service descriptions and customer requests into the input language of the ASP software DLV. Composition goals and constraints guide a composition challenge. We show the performance of our program and give some implementation details. Finally we conclude with some insights.