SHOP2 and TLPlan for Proactive Service Composition
Maja Vuković, Peter Robinson · 2005
Abstract. Recent advances in computer technology are making the development of context aware applications possible. Such applications are complicated by the variety of contextual types that must be accommodated, together with the range of values for each context type. This makes it difficult to write and extend them. We are addressing this by building context aware applications as dynamically composed sequences of calls to Web services, considered as an AI planning problem. We identify the following three specific technical requirements for planning systems in order to handle Web service composition problem: (1) richness of domain description, (2) control constructs for assembling complex actions, and (3) a mechanism for plan optimization. In this paper, we compare two hand-coded planners, SHOP2 and TLPlan, and discuss their applicability to modelling and composing of Web services, using a specific context aware composition problem. 1