Towards Dynamic, Relevance-Driven Exception Resolution in Composite Web Services

Abstract. Web services have become the leading technology for application-toapplication (A2A) communication over distributed and heterogeneous environments. Both academia and industry have strived to enable useful service collaborations among distributed systems without any human intervention. Web service composition can be used to this end, to achieve business automation within one company or realize business-to-business (B2B) integration of heterogeneous software and cross-organizational computing systems. Service composition pro-vides added value, when a web service composition itself becomes a higher level composite web service. However, as business processes are long-lasting transactions, exceptions may often occur, necessitating the replacement of a service component which has been made unavailable, hindering the completion of some business process. In this paper we present an exception resolving approach based on discovering replacement components that are functionally equivalent, taking also into account criteria for qualitative substitutability. The proposed solution introduces the Service Relevance and Replacement Framework (SRRF) which undertakes exception handling