Web Services Composition Research and Applications

Web services are now considered to be a potential silver bullet for the envisioned Service Oriented Architecture, in which loosely coupled software components are published, located, and executed as integral parts of distributed applications. The main research focus of web services is to achieve the interoperability between distributed and heterogeneous applications. The attainment of interoperability can be regarded as to solve a problem of composing distributed web services to satisfy the given goal in a timely manner, especially by leveraging Artificial Intelligent(AI) or Semantic Web technologies. This book, therefore, proposes an AI planning-based framework that enables the dynamic composition of web services in diverse and large-scale service networks, and also explores the application of web services composition technology toward interoperable semantic network-centric manufacturing. The proposals and exploration in this book should be especially useful to professionals who want to utilize web services to realize the semantic network-centric manufacturing paradigm, or anyone else who is interested in working on web services composition research and its application.