Web Service Composition via the Customization of Golog Programs with User Preferences

We claim that user preferences are a key component of effective Web service composition, and one that has largely been ignored. In this paper we propose a means of specifying and intergrating user preferences into Web service composition. To this end, we propose a means of performing automated Web service composition by exploiting a flexible template of the composition in the form of a generic procedure. This template is augmented by a rich specification of user preferences that guide the instantiation of the template. We exploit the agent programming language Golog to represent our templates as Golog generic procedures and we exploit a first-order preference language to represent rich qualitative temporally-extended user preferences. From these we generate Web service compositions that realize a given generic procedure, satisfying the user’s hard constraints and optimizing for the user’s preferences. We prove our approach is sound and optimal. Our system, GologPref, is implemented and interacting with services on the Web. The language and techniques proposed in this paper can be integrated into a variety of approaches to Web or Grid service composition.