Selecting and combining services using goals: A step towards goal-driven processes

The problem of service selection and composition is central to the field of Semantic Web Services (SWS). Developing effective selection and composition of services can not only produce dynamic service-based environments, but also help business teams and information system developers to better satisfy their user requirements. We propose a new framework, the objective of which is to go one step further during the business process modeling activity and to help analysts design their models, expressing some steps of a business process in terms of goals instead of directly attaching SOA services. Our work proposes an approach to select and combine services using Intelligent agents and planning techniques, using a goal as a source. With this approach we can produce a solution containing one or more services to reach the given goal. We propose MOSS as a formal language to describe the preconditions and effects of services and the goals of agents, and show how the evaluation mechanism can be used to check the preconditions in a given representation of the world, build the potential effects before the execution, and determine if a service will contribute to the goal of an agent.