Declarative Web services composition using proofs

Over the last decade, Web services composition has become a thriving area of research and development endeavors for application integration and interoperability. Although Web services composition has been heavily investigated, several issues still need to be addressed. In this paper, we mainly discuss two major bottlenecks in the current process of modeling compositions. The first bottleneck is related to the level of expertise required to achieve a composition process. Typical procedural style of modeling, inspired by workflow/business process paradigm, do not provide the required abstractions. Therefore, they fail to support dynamic and self-managed compositions able to adapt to unpredictable changes. The second bottleneck in current service compositions concerns their life cycle and their management, also called their governance. In this context, we propose a declarative proof-based approach to Web service composition. Based on the three stages of pre-composition, abstraction, and composition, our solution provides an easy way to specify functional and non-functional requirements of composite services in a precise and declarative manner. It guides the user through the composition process while allowing detection and recovery of violations at both design and run-time using proofs and planning. Experiment results clearly show the added value of the proof-based solution as a viable strategy to improve the composition process.