Provider-composer negotiations for semantic robustness in service compositions

Research in automating service composition is rarely concerned with service providers, apart from work in quality guarantees and contracts. This perspective is arguably valid for comparatively static and cheap web services, which do not warrant continuous involvement of their providers in the process of service procurement and use by service consumers. However, opportunities for optimisation and fine-tuning of compositions are thus missed. We have created an approach which uses automated agent-based negotiation between service composer and service providers to address the issue of semantic robustness in large-scale service compositions by preventing cases where the wrong type of data is passed on from one service to the next. Starting from a service composition template which is not semantically robust, we allow the selection of semantically robust combinations of actual services. The approach is characterised with a linear complexity and also allows service providers to tune their services to the requirements of service compositions which may be lucrative business opportunities. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.