skip to main content
research-article

Flexible provisioning of web service workflows

Published:23 February 2009Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

Web services promise to revolutionize the way computational resources and business processes are offered and invoked in open, distributed systems, such as the Internet. These services are described using machine-readable metadata, which enables consumer applications to automatically discover and provision suitable services for their workflows at run-time. However, current approaches have typically assumed service descriptions are accurate and deterministic, and so have neglected to account for the fact that services in these open systems are inherently unreliable and uncertain. Specifically, network failures, software bugs and competition for services may regularly lead to execution delays or even service failures. To address this problem, the process of provisioning services needs to be performed in a more flexible manner than has so far been considered, in order to proactively deal with failures and to recover workflows that have partially failed. To this end, we devise and present a heuristic strategy that varies the provisioning of services according to their predicted performance. Using simulation, we then benchmark our algorithm and show that it leads to a 700% improvement in average utility, while successfully completing up to eight times as many workflows as approaches that do not consider service failures.

References

  1. Aggarwal, R., Verma, K., Miller, J., and Milnor, W. 2004. Constraint driven web service composition in METEOR-S. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Services Computing 2004 (SCC 2004). IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 23--30. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  2. Aghdaie, N. and Tamir, Y. 2003. Fast transparent failover for reliable web service. In Proceedings of the 15th IASTED International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems (PDCS). 757--762.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  3. Akkiraju, R., Verma, K., Goodwin, R., Doshi, P., and Lee, J. 2004. Executing abstract web process flows. In Proceedings of the ICAPS Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Web and Grid Services. 9--15.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  4. Anderson, D. P., Cobb, J., Korpela, E., Lebofsky, M., and Werthimer, D. 2002. SETI@home: An experiment in public-resource computing. Comm. ACM 45, 11, 56--61. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  5. Arunachalam, R. and Sadeh, N. 2004. The 2003 supply chain management trading agent competition. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC '04). 113--120. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  6. Baccelli, F., Jean-Marie, A., and Liu, Z. 1993. A survey on solution methods for task graph models. In Arbeitsberichte der IMMD, N. Götz, U. Herzog, and M. Rettelbach, Eds. Vol. 26 (14). Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Chapter Second QMIPS Workshop, 163--183.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. Benatallah, B., Hacid, M.-S., Leger, A., Rey, C., and Toumani, F. 2005. On automating web services discovery. VLDB J. 14, 1, 84--96. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. Bolot, J.-C. 1993. End-to-end packet delay and loss behavior in the internet. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM '93 Conference on Communications Architectures, Protocols and Applications. ACM, New York, 289--298. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  9. Buyya, R., Abramson, D., and Venugopal, S. 2005. The grid economy. Proc. IEEE 93, 3, 698--714.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  10. Bylander, T. 1994. The computational complexity of propositional STRIPS planning. Artif. Intell. 69, 1-2, 165--204. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  11. Canfora, G., Penta, M. D., Esposito, R., and Villani, M. L. 2005. QoS-aware replanning of composite web services. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS'05). IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA. 121--129. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  12. Casati, F., Ceri, S., Paraboschi, S., and Pozzi, G. 1999. Specification and implementation of exceptions in workflow management systems. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 24, 3, 405--451. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  13. Cohen, P. R. 1995. Empirical methods for artificial intelligence. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. Collins, J., Bilot, C., Gini, M., and Mobasher, B. 2001. Decision processes in agent-based automated contracting. IEEE Internet Comput. 5, 2, 61--72. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  15. Cristian, F. 1991. Understanding fault-tolerant distributed systems. Comm. ACM 34, 2, 56--78. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  16. Curbera, F., Duftler, M., Khalaf, R., Nagy, W., Mukhi, N., and Weerawarana, S. 2002. Unraveling the web services web: An introduction to SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. IEEE Internet Comput. 6, 2, 86--93. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  17. Curbera, F., Khalaf, R., Mukhi, N., Tai, S., and Weerawarana, S. 2003. The next step in web services. Comm. ACM 46, 10, 29--34. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  18. Dan, A., Davis, D., Kearney, R., King, R., Keller, A., Kuebler, D., Ludwig, H., Polan, M., Spreitzer, M., and Youssef, A. 2004. Web services on demand: WSLA-driven automated management. IBM Syst. J. 43, 1, 136--158. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  19. Deelman, E., Blythe, J., Gil, Y., Kesselman, C., Mehta, G., Vahi, K., Blackburn, K., Lazzarini, A., Arbree, A., Cavanaugh, R., and Koranda, S. 2003. Mapping abstract complex workflows onto grid environments. J. Grid Comput. 1, 1, 25--39.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  20. DeGroot, M. H. and Shervish, M. J. 2002. Probability and Statistics, 3rd ed. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  21. Dodin, B. 1985. Bounding the project completion time distribution in PERT networks. Oper. Res. 33, 4, 862--881.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  22. Eder, J. and Liebhart, W. 1995. The workflow activity model WAMO. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems. 87--98.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  23. Erradi, A., Maheshwari, P., and Tosic, V. 2006. Recovery policies for enhancing web services reliability. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS'06). IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA. 189--196. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  24. Ewing, B., Hillier, L., Wendl, M. C., and Green, P. 1998. Base-calling of automated sequencer traces using phred. I. Accuracy assessment. Genome Res. 8, 3, 175--185.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  25. Foster, I., Kesselman, C., and Tuecke, S. 2001. The anatomy of the grid: Enabling scalable virtual organizations. Int. J. High Perform. C. 15, 3, 200--222. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  26. Friese, T., Müller, J. P., and Freisleben, B. 2005. Self-healing execution of business processes based on a peer-to-peer service architecture. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems (ARCS '05), System Aspects in Organic and Pervasive Computing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3432. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany. 108--123.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  27. Garcia-Molina, H. and Salem, K. 1987. Sagas. In Proceedings of the 1987 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD '87). ACM, New York. 249--259. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  28. Gärtner, F. C. 1999. Fundamentals of fault-tolerant distributed computing in asynchronous environments. ACM Comput. Surv. 31, 1, 1--26. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  29. Georgakopoulos, D., Hornick, M. F., and Sheth, A. P. 1995. An overview of workflow management: From process modeling to workflow automation infrastructure. Distrib. Parallel Dat. 3, 2, 119--153. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  30. Ingham, D. B., Panzieri, F., and Shrivastava, S. K. 1999. Constructing dependable web services. In Advances in Distributed Systems, Advanced Distributed Computing: From Algorithms to Systems. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany, 277--294. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  31. Irwin, D. E., Grit, L. E., and Chase, J. S. 2004. Balancing risk and reward in a market-based task service. In Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC-13 '04). IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA. 160--169. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  32. Jaeger, M. C. and Ladner, H. 2005. Improving the QoS of WS compositions based on redundant services. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices (NWeSP 2005). 189--194. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  33. Jaeger, M. C. and Mühl, G. 2007. QoS-based selection of services: The implementation of a genetic algorithm. In Proceedings of the KiVS 2007 Workshop: Service-Oriented Architectures und Service-Oriented Computing (SOA/SOC). 359--370.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  34. Jennings, N. R. 2001. An agent-based approach for building complex software systems. Comm. ACM 44, 4, 35--41. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  35. Jennings, N. R., Faratin, P., Lomuscio, A. R., Parsons, S., Sierra, C., and Wooldridge, M. 2001. Automated negotiation: Prospects, methods and challenges. Group Decis. Negot. 10, 2, 199--215.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  36. Jennings, N. R., Faratin, P., Norman, T. J., O'Brien, P., and Odgers, B. 2000. Autonomous agents for business process management. Appl. Artif. Intell. 14, 2, 145--189.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  37. Klusch, M., Gerber, A., and Schmidt, M. 2005. Semantic web service composition planning with OWLS-XPlan. In Proceedings of the 1st Int. AAAI Fall Symposium on Agents and the Semantic Web. 55--62.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  38. Kochut, K., Arnold, J., Sheth, A., Miller, J., Kraemer, E., Arpinar, B., and Cardoso, J. 2003. IntelliGEN: A distributed workflow system for discovering protein-protein interactions. Distrib. Parallel Dat. 13, 1, 43--72. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  39. Li, W., He, J., Ma, Q., Yen, I.-L., Bastani, F., and Paul, R. 2005. A framework to support survivable web services. In Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'05). IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA. 93.2. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  40. Long, D. D. E., Muir, A., and Golding, R. A. 1995. A longitudinal survey of internet host reliability. In Proceedings of the 14th Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS'95). 2--9. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  41. Malcolm, D. G., Roseboom, J. H., Clark, C. E., and Fazar, W. 1959. Application of a technique for research and development program evaluation. Oper. Res. 7, 5, 646--669.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  42. Mandell, D. and McIlraith, S. 2003. Adapting BPEL4WS for the semantic web: The bottom-up approach to web service interoperation. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Semantic Web Conference. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2870, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany. 227--241.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  43. Martin, D., Paolucci, M., McIlraith, S., Burstein, M., McDermott, D., McGuinness, D., Parsia, B., Payne, T., Sabou, M., Solanki, M., Srinivasan, N., and Sycara, K. 2004. Bringing semantics to web services: The OWL-S approach. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Semantic Web Services and Web Process Composition (SWSWPC 2004). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3387, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany. 26--42.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  44. Maximilien, E. M. and Singh, M. P. 2004a. A framework and ontology for dynamic web services selection. IEEE Internet Comput. 8, 5, 84--93. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  45. Maximilien, E. M. and Singh, M. P. 2004b. Toward autonomic web services trust and selection. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC '04). 212--221. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  46. McDermott, D. 2002. Estimated-regression planning for interactions with web services. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on AI Planning and Scheduling (AIPS'02). 204--211.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  47. McGuinness, D. and van Harmelen, F. 2004. OWL web ontology language overview. Recommendation, W3C. February. (http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-features-20040210/).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  48. McIlraith, S. A. and Son, T. C. 2002. Adapting golog for composition of semantic web services. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR2002). 482--493.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  49. McIlraith, S. A., Son, T. C., and Zeng, H. 2001. Semantic web services. IEEE Intel. Syst. 16, 2, 46--53. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  50. Medjahed, B., Benatallah, B., Bouguettaya, A., Ngu, A. H. H., and Elmagarmid, A. K. 2003. Business-to-business interactions: issues and enabling technologies. VLDB J. 12, 1, 59--85. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  51. Menasce, D. 2002. QoS issues in web services. IEEE Internet Comput. 6, 6, 72--75. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  52. Merideth, M. G., Iyengar, A., Mikalsen, T., Tai, S., Rouvellou, I., and Narasimhan, P. 2005. Thema: Byzantine-fault-tolerant middleware for web-service applications. In Proceedings of the 24th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS'05). IEEE Computer Society press, Los Alamitos, CA. 131--142. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  53. Michalewicz, Z. and Fogel, D. B. 2004. How to solve it: Modern Heuristics, 2nd ed. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  54. Milanovic, N. and Malek, M. 2004. Current solutions for web service composition. IEEE Internet Comput. 8, 6, 51--59. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  55. Ng, K.-C. and Abramson, B. 1990. Uncertainty management in expert systems. IEEE Expert 5, 2, 29--48. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  56. Nicola, V. F. and Goyal, A. 1990. Modeling of correlated failures and community error recovery in multiversion software. IEEE T. Software Eng. 16, 3, 350--359. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  57. Norman, T. J., Preece, A., Chalmers, S., Jennings, N. R., Luck, M., Dang, V. D., Nguyen, T. D., Deora, V., Shao, J., Gray, A. W., and Fiddian, N. J. 2004. Agent-based formation of virtual organisations. Knowl.-Based Syst. 17, 2--4, 103--111.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  58. O'Brien, A., Newhouse, S., and Darlington, J. 2004. Mapping of scientific workflow within the e-protein project to distributed resources. In Proceedings of the UK E-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM 2004). 404--409.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  59. Oinn, T., Greenwood, M., Addis, M., Alpdemir, M. N., Ferris, J., Glover, K., Goble, C., Goderis, A., Hull, D., Marvin, D., Li, P., Lord, P., Pocock, M. R., Senger, M., Stevens, R., Wipat, A., and Wroe, C. 2006. Taverna: Lessons in creating a workflow environment for the life sciences. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience 18, 10, 1067--1100. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  60. Paolucci, M., Kawamura, T., Payne, T. R., and Sycara, K. P. 2002. Semantic matching of web services capabilities. In Proceedings of the 1st International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2002). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2342, Springer-Verlag, New York. 333--347. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  61. Paolucci, M. and Sycara, K. 2003. Autonomous semantic web services. IEEE Internet Comput. 7, 5, 34--41. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  62. Raiffa, H. 1968. Decision Analysis: Introductory Lectures on Choices Under Uncertainty. McGraw-Hill, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  63. Ran, S. 2003. A model for web services discovery with QoS. SIGecom Exch. 4, 1, 1--10. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  64. Russell, S. and Norvig, P. 2003. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 2nd ed. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  65. Schroeder, B., and Gibson, G. A. 2006. A large-scale study of failures in high-performance computing systems. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN2006). 249--258. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  66. Singh, M. P. and Huhns, M. N. 2005. Service-Oriented Computing: Semantics, Processes, Agents. Wiley, New York.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  67. Sirin, E., Parsia, B., and Hendler, J. 2005. Template-based composition of semantic web services. In Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Agents and the Semantic Web. 85--92.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  68. Smith, T. M., Abajian, C., and Hood, L. 1997. Hopper: Software for automating data tracking and flow in DNA sequencing. Comput. Appl. Biosci. 13, 2, 175--182.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  69. Stein, S., Jennings, N. R., and Payne, T. R. 2007a. Provisioning heterogeneous and unreliable providers for service workflows. In Proceedings of the 22nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 1452--1458.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  70. Stein, S., Payne, T. R., and Jennings, N. R. 2006. Flexible provisioning of semantic web service workflows using a QoS ontology. In Proceedings of the 5th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2006), Online supplement. (available at http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12992/).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  71. Stein, S., Payne, T. R., and Jennings, N. R. 2007b. An effective strategy for the flexible provisioning of service workflows. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Service-Oriented Computing: Agents, Semantics, and Engineering (SOCASE 2007). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4504. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany, 16--30.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  72. Szomszor, M., Payne, T. R., and Moreau, L. 2005. Using semantic web technology to automate data integration in grid and web service architectures. In Proceedings of the Semantic Infrastructure for Grid Computing Applications Workshop in Cluster Computing and Grid (CCGrid). 189--195. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  73. Teacy, W. T. L., Patel, J., Jennings, N. R., and Luck, M. 2006. TRAVOS: Trust and reputation in the context of inaccurate information sources. J. Auton. Agents Multi-Agent Syst. 12, 2, 183--198. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  74. Tillman, F. A., and Liittschwager, J. M. 1967. Integer programming formulation of constrained reliability problems. Manage. Sci. 13, 11, 887--899.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  75. Townend, P., Groth, P., and Xu, J. 2005. A provenance-aware weighted fault tolerance scheme for service-based applications. In Proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Symposium on Object-Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing (ISORC'05). IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 258--266. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  76. Trivedi, K. 2001. Probability and Statistics with Reliability, Queuing, and Computer Science Applications, 2nd ed. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., USA. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  77. Weatherspoon, H., Moscovitz, T., and Kubiatowicz, J. 2002. Introspective failure analysis: Avoiding correlated failures in peer-to-peer systems. In Proceedings of the 21st IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems. 362--367. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  78. Weerawarana, S., Curbera, F., Leymann, F., Storey, T. and Ferguson, D. F. 2005. Web Services Platform Architecture. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  79. Weiss, G., Ed. 1999. Multiagent systems: A modern approach to distributed artificial intelligence. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  80. Yang, Z. and Duddy, K. 1996. CORBA: A platform for distributed object computing. ACM Oper. Syst. Rev. 30, 2, 4--31. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  81. Yu, T. and Lin, K.-J. 2005. Adaptive algorithms for finding replacement services in autonomic distributed business processes. In Proceedings of Autonomous Decentralized Systems (ISADS 2005). 427--434.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  82. Yu, T., Zhang, Y., and Lin, K.-J. 2007. Efficient algorithms for web services selection with end-to-end QoS constraints. ACM Trans. Web 1, 1, 6. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  83. Zeng, L., Benatallah, B., Dumas, M., Kalagnanam, J., and Sheng, Q. Z. 2003. Quality driven web services composition. In Proceedings of the 12th International World Wide Web Conf. (WWW '03). 411--421. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  84. Zhou, C., Chia, L.-T., and Lee, B.-S. 2004. DAML-QoS ontology for web services. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2004). IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 472--479. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. Flexible provisioning of web service workflows

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Login options

      Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

      Sign in

      Full Access

      PDF Format

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader
      About Cookies On This Site

      We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website.

      Learn more

      Got it!