Enterprise interoperability with SOA: a survey of service composition approaches

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) claims to facilitate the construction of flexible and loosely coupled business applications, and therefore is seen as an enabling factor for enterprise interoperability. The concept of service, which is central to SOA, is very convenient to address the matching of needs and capabilities in enterprise collaborations. In order to satisfy more demanding needs or to rapidly adapt to changing needs it is possible to perform service composition in order to combine the capabilities provided through several available services. This paper presents a survey on recent approaches for service composition. To perform this study a conceptual framework for service composition is proposed. This framework allows studying how different approaches deal with the service composition life-cycle and provides basic guidelines for their analysis, evaluation and comparison. The proposed framework is used to analyse five representative service composition approaches.