Composition of engineering web services with distributed data-flows and computations

This paper describes an experimental Flow-based Infrastructure for Composing Autonomous Services (FICAS), which supports a service-composition paradigm that integrates loosely coupled software components. For traditional software service composition frameworks, the data-flows and control-flows are centrally coordinated, and the composed service operates as the hub for all data communications. FICAS, on the other hand, employs a distributed data-flow approach that supports direct data exchanges among web services. The distributed data-flows can avoid many performance bottlenecks attending centralized processing. The performance and flexibility of FICAS are further improved by adopting active mediation, which distributes computations within the service framework, and reduces the amount of data traffic significantly by moving computations closer to the data. A system has been prototyped to integrate several project management and scheduling software applications. The prototype implementation demonstrates that distributed data-flow, combining with active mediation, is effective and more efficient than centralized processing when integrating large engineering software services.