A heuristic bidirectional search algorithm for automatic Web service composition

With the proliferation of Web services and the evolution towards the Semantic Web comes the opportunity to automate various Web services tasks. A number of approaches have been proposed to tackle the problem of automatic web service composition. Most of them are inspired by the researches in AI planning. As heuristics plays a key role in the promotion of planning efficiency, the selection of heuristic mechanism is very important. In this paper, we propose the conception of composition distance, and propose a heuristic bidirectional search algorithm based on composition distance. The most contribution of this paper is: (1)propose the conception of composition distance: (2)a heuristic bidirectional search algorithm. The algorithm we proposed is effective and efficiency when applied in web service composition engine.