Exploring the Flexible Workflow Technology to Automate Service Composition

Most of the current workflow-based service composition frameworks and systems require processes to be predefined and services to be statically-bound, thus lacking necessary flexibility to adapt to frequent changes arising from domain/business/user rules and the dynamic Internet environment. This paper proposes a service composition framework based on a flexible workflow method, which enables a part of a process to be created by automatic service composition. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic service composition framework which enables a part of a process to be created by automatic service composition. In this framework, we encapsulate those uncertain, dynamic and variable parts of a process into black-boxes with a set of rules at the modeling phase. While at the executing phrase, black-boxes are concretized by composing services according to the predefined rules automatically. This framework has been implemented in DartFlow-a service composition platform for the sharing of the TCM (Tradition Chinese Medicine) knowledge and services.