Configurable composition and adaptive provisioning of web services

Abstract

Web services composition has been an active research area over the last few years. However, the technology is still not mature yet and several research issues need to be addressed. In this paper, we describe the design of CCAP, a system that provides tools for adaptive service composition and provisioning. We introduce a composition model where service context and exceptions are configurable to accommodate needs of different users. This allows for reusability of a service in different contexts and achieves a level of adaptiveness and contextualization without recoding and recompiling of the overall composed services. The execution semantics of the adaptive composite service is provided by an event-driven model. This execution model is based on Linda Tuple Spaces and supports real-time and asynchronous communication between services. Three core services, coordination service, context service, and event service, are implemented to automatically schedule and execute the component services, and adapt to user configured exceptions and contexts at run time. The proposed system provides an efficient and flexible support for specifying, deploying, and accessing adaptive composite services. We demonstrate the benefits of our system by conducting usability and performance studies.