A Semi-automated Orchestration Tool for Service-Based Business Processes

When creating service compositions from a very large number of atomic service operations, it is inherently difficult for the modeler to discover suitable operations for his particular goal. Automated service composition claims to solve this problem, but only works if complete and correct ontologies alongside with service descriptions are in place. In this paper, we present a semi-automated modeling environment for Web service compositions. At every step in the process of creating the composition, the environment suggests the modeler a number of relevant Web services. Furthermore, the environment summarizes the problems that would prevent the composed service from being invocable. The environment is also able to insert composed services into the composition at suitable places, with atomic services producing the required data artifacts to come to an invocable composition. Our results show that this mixed initiative approach significantly eases the creation of composed services. We validated our implementation with the leading vendor of business applications, using their processes and service repository, which spans across multiple functional areas of enterprise computing.