Dynamic Service Composition: a Discovery-Based Approach

Service-Orientated Computing (SOC) has become a main trend in software engineering that promotes the construction of applications based on the notion of services. SOC has recently attracted the researchers’ attention and has been adopted industry-wide. However, service composition that enables one to aggregate existing services into a new composite service is still a highly complex and critical task in service-oriented technology. To enhance availability of composite services, we propose a discovery-based service composition framework to better integrate component services in both static and dynamic manner, including (1) to devise a notion of service availability especially for composition; (2) to develop a dynamic service composition (DSC) pattern for addressing the issues of service availability; and (3) to extend Contract Net Protocol (ECNP) to coordinate service discovery, composition and invocation based on the composite pattern. The main benefit of the proposed approach is better availability through attaching multiple candidate services for future binding.