A Fluent Calculus Approach to Automatic Web Service Composition

Web service composition is mandatory when complex functional requirements cannot be satisfied by a single Web service. Because of the exponential growth of available Web services, their automatic discovery and composition are highly desirable tasks. This paper presents a new approach for automatic Web service composition based on the formalism of Fluent Calculus using semantic service descriptions. In our approach, the Web service composition process is viewed as an AI planning problem in the Fluent Calculus formalism. To semantically describe Web services, we have used a Web service domain ontology which is then translated into a Fluent Calculus knowledge base, necessary for the composition planning phase. For verifying the composed services, the Label Transition System Analyzer (LTSA) formalism is used. The paper also presents an experimental prototype for the Fluent Calculus based Web service composition and demonstrates its effectiveness with the help of an application scenario from the social event planning domain.