Preference-Driven Refinement of Service Compositions

Abstract : The Service Oriented Computing Paradigm proposes the construction of applications by integrating pre-existent services. Since a large number of services may be available in the Cloud, the selection of services is a crucial task in the definition of a composition. The selected services should attend the requirements of the compound application, by considering both functional and non-functional requirements (including quality and preference constraints). As the number of available services increases, the automation of the selection task becomes desirable. We propose a method for the refinement of service compositions that takes the abstract specification of a composition, the definition of concrete services and user preferences. Our algorithm produces a list of refinements in preference order. Experiments show that our method can be used in practice.