On accommodating inter service dependencies in Web process flow composition

Abstract

Current business process flow representation languages such as BPEL4WS are prescriptive and operate at the execution level. They do not accommodate abstract specifications of business activities and dynamic binding of Web Services at run time. Moreover, dynamic selection of Web services for a process is, often, not a stand-alone operation. There may be many inter-service dependencies and domain constraints that need consideration in selecting legal and meaningful services for realizing an abstract flow. In this paper, we present a prototype for dynamic binding of Web Services for abstract specifications of business integration flows using a constraint-based semantic-discovery mechanism. Building on prior work in this area (Mandel and McIlraith 2002), we provide a way of modeling and accommodating scoped constraints and inter-service dependencies within a process flow while dynamically binding services. The result is a system that allows people to focus on creating appropriate high-level flows, while providing a robust and adaptable runtime. Copyright © 2004, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.