Classification of the state-of-the-art dynamic web services composition techniques

Abstract

Dynamic web service composition can serve applications or users on an on-demand basis. With dynamic composition, the application's capabilities can be extended at runtime so that theoretically an unlimited number of new services can be created from a limited set of service components, thus making applications no longer restricted to the original set of operations specified and envisioned at design and/or compile time. Moreover, dynamic composition is the only means to adapt the behaviour of running components in highly available applications such as, banking and telecommunication systems where services cannot be brought offline to upgrade or remove obsolete services. In this paper, we present a novel classification of the current state-of-the-art dynamic web services composition techniques with attention to the capabilities and limitations of the underlying approaches. The proposed taxonomy of these techniques is derived based on a comprehensive survey of what has been done so far in dynamic web service composition. Finally, we summarise our findings and present a vision for future research work in this area.