A tool for automatic generation of WS-BPEL compositions from OWL-S described services

Service composition is a fundamental facet of Service Oriented Architecture to burst the creation of new services and knowledge throughout the Internet. Automating this aspect has been for many years an interesting research topic for people working in several research areas. In spite of the several scientific results already achieved, generating a concrete and runnable service composition from the semantic descriptions of the domain services and the problem to solve is still an open issue. This paper presents an approach to automatic service composition in the context of autonomic workflows and a related tool developed for an IT industrial context. The tool is able to retrieve service descriptions from a repository, to support the definition of the problem to solve, to generate an abstract plan and to translate it into an executable process language, such as WS-BPEL. This way, the tool covers the overall life-cycle of autonomic workflows, from their inception to the adaptive execution. The paper compares the approach with other proposals and shows its effectiveness through a case study that exploits automatic service composition to handle an emergency situation caused by a hydro-geological disaster.