Towards a high-availability-driven service composition framework

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC), a main trend in software engineering, promotes the construction of applications based on the notion of services. SOC has recently attracted a great deal of attention from researchers, and has been comprehensively adopted by industry. However, service composition enabling the aggregation of existing services into composite services still imposes a great challenge to service-oriented technology. Web service composition requires component Web services to be available in request, to behave correctly in operation, and to be replaceable flexibly in failure. Although availability of Web services plays a crucial role in building robust SOC-based applications, it has been largely neglected, especially for service composition. In this chapter, we propose a service composition framework that integrates a set of composition-based service discovery mechanisms, a user-oriented service delivery approach, as well as a service management mechanism for composite services.