Planning Based Service Composition
This chapter presents how automated service composition can be considered as a planning problem. Furthermore it identifies the following three specific technical requirements for planning systems in order to handle service composition problem: (1) richness of domain description, (2) control constructs for assembling complex actions, and (3) a mechanism for plan optimization. This chapter illustrates a number of existing planning systems and discusses their applicability to automated service composition. The chapter then describes a service composition framework, based on a forward chaining planner, and how the abstract plan is instantiated into an executable service. Finally, the chapter discusses future research directions in planning based service composition.