Anytime Planning for Web Service Composition via Alternative Plan Merging

This paper presents an approach towards automated semantic web service composition using contingent planning. The presented planner, MAPPPA, is an anytime probabilistic planner tailor-made for web service composition problems that produces a contingent plan by integrating alternative deterministic plans previously computed from a determinized version of the original planning problem. The planner can produce each plan without disregarding the important information that each web service contains in relation to its cost and probability of alternative outcomes. MAPPPA has already been integrated into our prototype web service composition platform, MADSWAN, producing promising results.