Understanding approaches for web service composition and execution

Abstract

Web services have received much interest due to their potential in facilitating seamless business-to-business or enterprise application integration. Of particular interest is the Web Service Composition and Execution (WSCE) process - the creation of a workflow that realizes the functionality of a new service and its subsequent deployment and execution on a runtime environment. A significant number of solutions have been proposed in the literature for composition and execution of web services. However, in order to choose a suitable technique for an application scenario, one needs to systematically analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each of these solutions. To this end, we present an analysis that includes formalization of the WSCE process, a classification of existing solutions into four distinct categories (approaches), and an in-depth evaluation of these approaches. Our evaluation is based on multiple metrics that we deem critical for a WSCE system, e.g. composition effort, composition control, and ability to handle failures. We also present an application of this analysis to three different scenarios.