Reducing Nondeterminism in Automated Service Composition

Automated service composition has been studied as a subject of state based planning for a decade. A great deal of service composition tasks can only be solved if concrete output values of the services are considered in the composition process. However, the fact that those values are not known before runtime leads to nondeterministic planning problems, which have proven to be notoriously difficult in practical automated service composition applications. Even though this problem is frequently recognized, it has still received remarkably few attention and remains unsolved. This paper shows how nondeterminism in automated service composition can be reduced. We introduce context rules as a means to derive semantic knowledge from output values of services. These rules enable us to replace nondeterministic composition operations by less nondeterministic or even completely deterministic ones. We show the validity of our solutions not only theoretically but also have evaluated them practically through implementation.