Automated Online Service Composition

Services are self-contained and platform independent software components that aim at maximizing software reuse. The automated composition of services to a target software artifact has been tackled with many AI techniques, but existing approaches make unreasonably strong assumptions such as a predefined data flow, are limited to tiny problem sizes, ignore non-functional properties, or assume offline service repositories. This paper presents an algorithm that automatically composes services without making such assumptions. We employ a backward search algorithm that starts from an empty composition and prepends service calls to already discovered candidates until a solution is found. Available services are determined during the search process. We implemented our algorithm, performed an experimental evaluation, and compared it to other approaches.