Service Composition in Public Networks: Results from a Quasi-Experiment

New systems can be created by assembling a set of elementary services provided by various stakeholders in a service composition. Service composition is not a trivial endeavor and several composition methods exist. Yet, these methods are hardly adopted by the field, as they need a set of well-defined and well- described services and are not able to deal with incomplete information and unambiguous descriptions. Furthermore, these methods are not able to deal with situations in which stakeholders have different requirements and need to negotiate with each other about the selection and performance of services.In this paper we present a service composition method and evaluate this method using a quasi-experimental design. The method is aimed at dealing with a set of heterogeneous services provided by stakeholders with different and sometimes even opposing requirements. We found that our composition method helps to create an overview of services and their attributes and enables better communication between stakeholders. A recommendation for further research is to integrate semantic and multi-actor composition methods.