Towards Automated Choreographing of Web Services Using Planning

For Web service composition, choreography has recently received great attention and demonstrated a few key advantages over orchestration such as distributed control, fairness, data efficiency, and scalability. Automated design of choreography plans, especially distributed plans for multiple roles, is more complex and has not been studied before. Existing work requires manual generation assisted by model checking. In this paper, we propose a novel planning-based approach that can automatically convert a given composition task to a distributed choreography specification. Although planning has been used for orchestration, it is difficult to use planning for choreography, as it involves decentralized control, concurrent workflows, and contingency. We propose a few novel techniques, including compilation of contingencies, dependency graph analysis, and communication control, to handle these characteristics using planning. We theoretically show the correctness of this approach and empirically evaluate its practicability.