Dynamic Service Composition: State-of-the-Art and Research Directions
Dipanjan Chakraborty, Anupam Joshi · 2001
Service Composition refers to creation of complex e-services with the help of smaller, simpler, easily executable lightweight e-services or components. In essence, it is much similar to component-based or object-based software design and implementation, but different in its approach. The spurt of e-services on the web has recently increased the importance of service composition. There has been some research in trying to leverage this wide array of e-services available over the network to be able to provide more customized, complex services to e-customers. In the recent past, we have also seen the increasing use of mobile devices. We have seen the deployment of ad hoc networks like Bluetooth. We envisage that in the future, service composition will play a crucial role in providing access to complex services to a mobile device by utilizing resources available in its vicinity. This paper is an attempt to summarize the existing work in the field of service composition and critically evaluate the present composition platforms. We try to judge the suitability of the current platforms to be able to do dynamic service composition in an ad hoc environment. The paper also provides an overview of our current work in this area and points to certain future directions with respect to the next generation of e-services, viz. mobile-services.