A User-Steering Exploratory Service Composition Approach

Service orchestration logics can be difficult to be totally pre-fabricated when facing uncertain requirements. It is sometimes indispensable to get end users involved. However, there are some requirements: 1) Allow users to express their desired goals incrementally. 2) Allow users to specify key trajectory constraints. 3) Provide intelligent assistance to users in the composition. Intuitively we propose a user-steering explorative service composition approach that can support extended goals. It gives users more control and facilitates incremental development by suggesting candidate paths. During the generation of candidate paths, we use heuristics to find better plan paths, then guide users to gradually progress towards the goal. The proposed approach is verified in a typical bioinformatics scenario. The preliminary experiment results show that the approach can improve the efficiency and timelyness of service composition.