An extended web service composition model with teamwork semantics

• Κύριος συγγραφέας: Τσούτσα, Παρασκευή
• Άλλοι συγγραφείς: Tsoutsa, Paraskevi
• Γλώσσα: English
• Έκδοση: 2021
• Θέματα: Web services; Microservices; Composition of services; Service teamwork; Role modeling; Team; Agent teamwork; Collaboration; Synergy; Business information systems; Group performance; Team decision making; Υπηρεσίες ιστού; Μικρουπηρεσίες; Σύνθεση υπηρεσιών ιστού; Συνεργασία υπηρεσιών; Μοντελοποίηση ρόλων; Ομάδα; Ομάδα πρακτόρων; Συνέργεια; Πληροφοριακά συστήματα επιχειρήσεων; Ομαδική διαδικασία απόφασης; Απόδοση ομάδας

Web services and service based architectures have created opportunities to establish more flexible collaboration among different domains, such as smart cities, smart factories, resource management, intelligent transportation, health and many other. The aim of research efforts around web services is mainly to facilitate their handling and composition. Service composition constitutes a challenging task of service provisioning as it can produce new composite services with features not present in the individual ones. Also, service composition can serve applications or users on-demand basis, so the ability to efficiently select and integrate heterogeneous services at runtime becomes an important requirement to the Web service provision. This is also due to the fact that, by automatically composing services, their capabilities can be extended at runtime, therefore theoretically an unlimited number of new services can be created from an existing set of components, thus making applications no longer restricted to the original set of operations specified and envisioned at the design time. Initial web service efforts failed to hold the promise for providing generic mechanisms that support discovering, composing, evaluating, executing and monitoring web services in dynamic environments, especially with the issues raised by the development of new technologies such as Cloud Computing, Internet of Things and Cyber Physical Systems. Semantic technologies provide the tools to address various challenges related to the web services technology, particularly those to be performed in the dynamic mode. However, in order to realize this potential, significant hurdles still have to be overcome. To deal with these hurdles, an improvement of the process of service composition becomes necessary, especially a higher degree of autonomy. Following this direction, service composition has to proceed autonomously, which on the one hand side reduce human involvement to a minimum, but on the other side require certain capabilities on the part of the mechanisms that will support it. This research considers the Web service composition problem from the viewpoint of teamwork and addresses the challenge of developing teamwork services, i.e. autonomously composite services capable of exhibiting teamwork behavior. A service capable of exhibiting teamwork behavior is one that can effectively cooperate with multiple potential teammates on a set of collaborative tasks to achieve the overall team goal. Firstly, we lay down the foundations and describe the interaction of services by exploiting the role Model theory. The description of services with roles and behaviors act as mediator between the different Web service languages and a formal description that will enable the reasoning over new paths of collaboration for composition purposes. Then, we benefit from the teamwork theory, which has spanned diverse disciplines from business management to cognitive science, human discourse, and distributed artificial intelligence and contribute by determining the dominant teamwork roles that prevail during service group cooperation. Novel service teamwork roles are developed and the role modeling approach is extended to enable web services to automatically cooperate by enhancing service’s interoperability. These roles aim to (i) enable services to manipulate the uncertainties by being proactive during their participation in specific events, (ii) capture potential emergent behavior that happens in the domain during service design and execution, (iii) arrest and handle any misbehaving of other participants that occurs in the domain, (iv) act as the glue needed to reconfigure and combine services appropriately in dynamic and unpredictable environments. The teamwork role model becomes especially important in dynamic environments since it enables the development of more efficient composite services, which are stable teams of services such that their components-members promote better understanding and are able to cooperate effectively to achieve their objectives. Their teamwork behavior help them to manipulate the uncertainties by enabling proactiveness during their participation and by capturing emergent behavior during the process of composition, in which services may have neither complete nor correct view about their world or other services, that not only have changeable actions and goals but they are also subject to failure from external events.