Service Composition with Functional Flexibility Using Nondeterministic Service Interface

Although previous works pertaining to Web service composition have paved the way for resolving the automatic composition issue with considering single IOPE goal, functional flexibility of service composition with complex workflow is not well-addressed. In this paper, we propose a novel service type, namely prospect service that possesses nondeterministic service interface beyond concrete and abstract services used by current service composition methods, to improve functional flexibility of service composition. Furthermore, we define a meta-model including prospect service and adaptable workflow template to provide comprehensive constructs for modeling flexible and adaptable workflow templates while developing an automatic instantiation method to instantiate concrete workflows with different functionalities from a template. Several experiments are also conducted to evaluate the performance of the automated method under different contexts.