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On-The-Fly computing: automatic service discovery and composition in heterogeneous domains

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Computer Science - Research and Development

Abstract

In software markets of the future, customer-specific software will be developed on demand based on distributed software and hardware services. Based on a customer-specific request, available service offers have to be discovered and composed into sophisticated IT services that fulfill the customer’s request. A prerequisite of this vision are rich service descriptions, which comprise structural as well as behavioral aspects of the services, otherwise an accurate service discovery and composition is not possible. However, automatic matching of service requests and offers specified in rich service descriptions for the purpose of service discovery is a complex task, due to the multifaceted heterogeneity of the service partners. This heterogeneity includes the use of different specification languages, different underlying ontologies, or different levels of granularity in the specification itself. In this article, we present a comprehensive approach for service discovery and composition, which overcomes the underlying heterogeneity of the service partners. Based on a realistic case study of our industrial partner from the e-tourism domain, we first introduce an automatic matching mechanism for service requests and offers specified in a rich service description language. In addition, we propose an automatic service composition approach, which determines possible service compositions by composing the service protocols through a composition strategy based on labeled transition systems.

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Notes

  1. http://sfb901.uni-paderborn.de.

  2. http://www.hrs.com.

  3. http://www.opentravel.org.

    Fig. 4
    figure 4

    Service discovery and composition for HRS in OTF computing

    Full size image

  4. http://www.harmonet.org.

  5. Please note that before operations in service offers and requests are matched, suitable service offers may be preselected based on a domain-specific categorization provided by the service market. However, this pre-selection is out of scope in our approach.

  6. Please note that before operations in service offers and requests are matched, suitable service offers may be preselected based on a domain-specific categorization provided by the service market. However, this preselection is out of scope in our approach.

  7. http://www.eclipse.org/papyrus/.

  8. http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/emft/henshin/.

  9. http://tomcat.apache.org/.

  10. http://www.mysql.com/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

    Zille Huma, Christian Gerth & Gregor Engels

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  1. Zille Huma
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  2. Christian Gerth
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  3. Gregor Engels
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Correspondence to Zille Huma.

Additional information

This work was partially supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the Collaborative Research Centre “On-The-Fly computing” (SFB 901).

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Huma, Z., Gerth, C. & Engels, G. On-The-Fly computing: automatic service discovery and composition in heterogeneous domains. Comput Sci Res Dev 30, 333–361 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-014-0254-z

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