Planning, the discipline of AI which focuses on synthesis of action sequences (or plans) to satisfy goals, has an important role to play to make Web Services Composition a practical reality. While the scope of web services
composition spans from creation of business process functionalities, to developing executable workflows
that capture nonfunctional (e.g. QoS) requirements, to deploying them on a runtime infrastructure, we are
interested in using planning to generate the initial plan templates that satisfy the functional goals. These plans
can be made optimal and deployable using deployment and runtime requirements known later. Planning needs to
be efficient in this interactive and uncertain domain, the domain could be incompletely modeled, the user has
hard and soft constraints, and the number of web services is large. We show how a contingent planner can be
adapted to this end by allowing for user inputs that are then employed to efficiently finds plans that matter
most to them. Moreover, the planner is useful for interactive planning applications in general.
By: Biplav Srivastava, Anupam Mediratta
Published in: RI06002 in 2006
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