Conceptual Modeling Approaches for Dynamic Web Service Composition

Service composition is a recent field that has seen a flurry of different approaches proposed towards the goal of flexible distributed heterogeneous interoperation of software systems. Usually they are based on the expectation that such systems must be derived from higher level models rather than be coded at low level. We survey the state-of-the-art of techniques for conceptual modeling of Web service composition from a broad, multi-field perspective that captures approaches from classical structure-oriented models over workflow languages to planning-based approaches. We describe how the related fields of model-driven development, conceptual modeling of business processes and workflows, semantic process descriptions through ontology, and service matching through constraint satisfaction can be utilized in a complementary way to support dynamic (i.e., runtime), instance-based selection and composition of Web services. Further we present an overview and a comparison of existing approaches for dynamic service composition.