Skip to main content
Log in

Facilitating the Rapid Development and Scalable Orchestration of Composite Web Services

  • Published:
Distributed and Parallel Databases Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The development of new Web services through the composition of existing ones has gained a considerable momentum as a means to realise business-to-business collaborations. Unfortunately, given that services are often developed in an ad hoc fashion using manifold technologies and standards, connecting and coordinating them in order to build composite services is a delicate and time-consuming task. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a system in which services are composed using a model-driven approach, and the resulting composite services are orchestrated following a peer-to-peer paradigm. The system provides tools for specifying composite services through statecharts, data conversion rules, and multi-attribute provider selection policies. These specifications are interpreted by software components that interact in a peer-to-peer way to coordinate the execution of the composite service. We report results of an experimental evaluation showing the relative advantages of this peer-to-peer approach with respect to a centralised one.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. W.M.P. van der Aalst, A.H.M. ter Hofstede, B. Kiepuszewski, and A.P. Barros, "Workflow patterns," Distributed and Parallel Databases, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 5–51, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Ariba Inc, Microsoft Co, and IBM Co, "Universal description, discovery and integration of business for the web," http://www.uddi.org, 2000.

  3. B. Benatallah and F. Casati (Eds.), "Special issue on web services," Distributed and Parallel Databases, An International Journal, 2002.

  4. B. Benatallah, F. Casati, F. Toumani, and R. Hamadi, "Conceptual modeling of web services conver-stations," in Proc. of the 15th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems (CAiSE'03), Klagernfurt/Velden, Austria, June 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  5. B. Benatallah, M. Dumas, M.C. Fauvet, and H.Y. Paik, "Self-coordinated and self-traced composite ser-vices with dynamic provider selection," Technical Report UNSW-CSE-TR-0108, School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of New South Wales, May 2001. Available at http://www.cse.unsw. edu.au/ ~qsheng/selfserv.ps.gz.

    Google Scholar 

  6. B. Benatallah, M. Dumas, Q.Z. Sheng, and A. Ngu, "Declarative composition and peer-to-peer provisioning of dynamic web services," in Proc. of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE'02), San Jose, USA, 2002, pp. 297–308.

  7. B. Benatallah, Q.Z. Sheng, and M. Dumas, "The Self-Serv environment for web services composition," IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 40–48, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  8. C. Bussler, F. Casati, S. Ceri, D. Georgakopoulos, T. Özsu, and M. Shan (Eds.), Proceedings of the 1st VLDB Workshop on Technologies for E-Services, Cairo, Egypt, May 2000.

  9. F. Casati, D. Georgakopoulos, and M. Shan (Eds.), "Special issue on E-services," VLDB Journal, vol. 24, no. 1, 2001.

  10. F. Casati and M.-C. Shan, "Dynamic and adaptive composition of E-services," Information Systems, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 143–162, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Q. Chen and M. Hsu, "Inter-enterprise collaborative business process management," in Proc. of 17th Inter-national Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE'01), Heidelberg, Germany, IEEE Computer Society, April 2001, pp. 253–260.

    Google Scholar 

  12. J. Clark and S. DeRose, XML path language (XPATH) version 1.0.

  13. E. Cobb, "The evolution of distributed component architectures," in Proc. of the 9th International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS'01), Trento, Italy, Sept. 2001, pp. 7–21.

    Google Scholar 

  14. F. Curbera, Y. Goland, J. Klein, F. Leymann, D. Roller, S. Thatte, and S. Weerawarana, "Business process execution language for web services," http://dev2dev.bea.com/techtrack/BPEL4WS.jsp.

  15. A. Dogac (Ed.), "Special issue on electronic commerce," ACM SIGMOD Record, vol. 27, no. 4, 1998.

  16. A. Dogac (Ed.), "Special section on data management issues in E-commerce," ACMSIGMODRecord, vol. 31, no. 1, 2002.

  17. A. Dogac and I. Cingil, "A survey and comparison of business-to-business E-commerce frameworks," ACM SIGecom Exchanges, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 14–25, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  18. A. Dogac, Y. Tambag, P. Pembecioglu, S. Pektas, G.B. Laleci, G. Kurt, S. Toprak, and Y. Kabak, "An ebXML infrastructure implementation through UDDI registries and RosettaNet PIPs," in Proc. of 2002 ACMSIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, Madison, Wisconsin, USA, June 2002.

  19. M. Dumas and A. ter Hofstede, "UML activity diagrams as a workflow specification language," in Proc. of the International Conference on the Unified Modeling Language (UML'01), Toronto, Canada, Oct. 2001.

  20. A. Elmagarmid and W.J. McIver, "The ongoing march toward digital government," IEEE Computer, vol. 34, no. 2, 2001.

  21. D. Fensel and C. Bussler, "The web service modeling framework WSMF," Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 113–137, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  22. M. Gillmann, J. Weißenfels, G. Weikum, and A. Kraiss, "Performance and availability assessment for the configuration of distributed workflow management systems," in Proc. of the 7th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT'00), Konstanz, Germany, March 2000, pp. 183–201.

  23. P. Grefen, K. Aberer, H. Ludwig, and Y. Hoffner, "CrossFlow: Cross-organizational workflowmanagement for service outsourcing in dynamic virtual enterprises," Special Issue on Infrastructure for Advanced E-Services, Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering, vol. 24, no. 1, 2001.

  24. D. Harel and A. Naamad, "The STATEMATE semantics of statecharts," ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 293–333, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  25. IBM WSTK Toolkit, http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/webservicestoolkit.

  26. N.R. Jennings, T.J. Norman, P. Faratin, P. O'Brien, and B. Odgers, "Autonomous agents for business process management," Journal of Applied Artificial Intelligence, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 145–189, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  27. A. Lazcano, G. Alonso, H. Schuldt, and C. Schuler, "The WISE approach to electronic commerce," Journal of Computer Systems Science and Engineering, vol. 15, no. 5, 2000.

  28. B. Medjaned, A. Rezgui, A. Bouguettaya, and M. Ouzzani, "Infrastructure for E-government web services," IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 58–65, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  29. P. Muth, D. Wodtke, J. Weissenfels, A.K. Dittrich, and G. Weikum, "From centralized workflow specification to distributed workflow execution," Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, vol. 10, no. 2, 1998.

  30. S. Narayana and S. McIlraith, "Simulation, verification and automated composition of web services," in Proc. of the 11th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'02), Honolulu, USA, May 2002.

  31. P. O'Kelly, "B2B content and process integration," http://www.psgroup.com/, Nov. 2000.

  32. H. Schuster, D. Georgakopoulos, A. Cichocki, and D. Baker, "Modeling and composing service-based and reference process-based multi-enterprise processes," in Proc. of the 12th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'00), Stockholm, June 2000.

  33. Web Services Description Language (WSDL), http://www.w3.org/wsdl.

  34. M. Shan, A. Umar, and Y. Zhang (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Research Issues on Data Engineering, San Jose, USA, Feb. 2002.

  35. Q.Z. Sheng, B. Benatallah, M. Dumas, and E. Mak, "SELF-SERV: A platform for rapid composition of web services in a peer-to-peer environment," in Proc. of the 28th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB'02), Hong Kong, China, Aug. 2002.

  36. Q.Z. Sheng, B. Benatallah, R. Stephan, E. Mak, and Y.Q. Zhu, "Discoverying E-services using UDDI in SELF-SERV," in Proc. of the International Conference on E-Business (ICEB'02), Beijing, China}, May 2002, pp. 396–401.

  37. Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP.

  38. M. Stolze and M. Stoebel, "Utility-based decision tree optimization: A framework for adaptive interviewing," in Proc. of the 8th International Conference on User Modelling, Sonthofen, Germany, 2001, pp. 105–116.

  39. D. VanderMeer, A. Datta, K. Dutta, H. Thomas, K. Ramamritham, and S. Navathe, "FUSION: A system allowing dynamic web service composition and automatic execution," in Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on E-Commerce(CEC'03), California, USA, June 2003, pp. 399–404.

  40. Web Services Conversation Language (WSCL), http://www.w3.org/TR/wscl10.

  41. B. Yang and H. Garcia-Molina, "Comparing hybrid peer-to-peer systems," in Proc. of 27th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB'01), Roma, Italy, 2001.

  42. L. Zeng, B. Benatallah, M. Dumas, J. Kalagnanam, and Q.Z. Sheng, "Quality driven web services composition," in Proc. of the 12th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'03), Budapest, Hungary, May 2003.

  43. L. Zeng, B. Benatallah, and A. Ngu, "On demand business-to-business integration," in Proc. of the 9th International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS'01), Trento, Italy, Sept. 2001, pp. 403–417.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Benatallah, B., Dumas, M. & Sheng, Q.Z. Facilitating the Rapid Development and Scalable Orchestration of Composite Web Services. Distributed and Parallel Databases 17, 5–37 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:DAPD.0000045366.15607.67

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:DAPD.0000045366.15607.67

Navigation