Abstract: Modern information systems are becoming more and more socio-technical systems, namely systems composed of human (social) agents and software (technical) systems operating together in a common environment. The structure of such systems has to evolve dynamically in response to the changes of the environment. When new requirements are introduced, when an actor leaves the system or when a new actor comes, the socio-technical structure needs to be redesigned and revised. In this paper, an approach to dynamic reconfiguration of a socio-technical system structure in response to internal or external changes is proposed. The approach is based on planning techniques for generating possible alternative configurations, and local strategies for their evaluation. The reconfiguration mechanism is presented, which makes the socio-technical system self-configuring, and the approach is discussed and analyzed on a simple case study.

Abstract. The quest for designing secure and trusted software has led to refined Software Engineering methodologies that rely on tools to support the design process. Automated reasoning mechanisms for requirements and software verification are by now a well-accepted part of the design process, and model driven architectures support the automation of the refinement process. We claim that we can further push the envelope towards the automatic exploration and selection among design alternatives and show that this is concretely possible for Secure Tropos, a requirements engineering methodology that addresses security and trust concerns. In Secure Tropos, a design consists of a network of actors (agents, positions or roles) with delegation/permission dependencies among them. Accordingly, the generation of design alternatives can be accomplished by a planner which is given as input a set of actors and goals and generates alternative multiagent plans to fulfill all given goals. We validate our claim with a case study using a state-of-the-art planner. 1

Automated matching of semantic service descriptions is the key to automatic service discovery and binding. But when trying to find a match for a certain request it may often happen, that the request cannot be serviced by a single offer but could be handled by combining existing offers. In this case automatic service composition is needed. Although automatic composition is an active field of research it is mainly viewed as a planning problem and treated separatedly from service discovery. In this paper we argue that an integrated approach to the problem is better than seperating these issues as is usually done. We propose an approach that integrates service composition into service discovery and matchmaking to match service requests that ask for multiple connected effects, discuss general issues involved in describing and matching such services and present an efficient algorithm implementing our ideas.

We propose a framework and polynomial algorithms for semantic-based automated Web service composition, fully compliant with Semantic Web technologies. The approach exploits the recently proposed Concept Abduction inference service in Description Logics to extend Concept covering definition to expressive logics and to solve Concept Covering problems in a significant subset of OWL-DL. We show how the proposed approach also deals with not-exact solutions, computing an approximate composition and providing an explanation of which part of the request is not covered by the composite service. We present the formalization of the approach, the proposed algorithms, a prototype system implementing the approach, and illustrate experiments carried out with it. KEY WORDS:

Abstract. At the early stages of the cooperative information system development one of the major problems is to explore the space of alternative ways of assignment and delegations of goals among system actors. The exploration process should be guided by a number of criteria to determine whether the adopted alternative is good-enough. This paper frames the problem of designing actor dependency networks as a multi-agent planning problem and adopts an off-the-shelf planner to offer a tool (P-Tool) that generates alternative actor dependency networks, and evaluates them in terms of metrics derived from Game Theory literature. As well, we offer preliminary experimental results on the scalability of the approach. 1

Abstract. This paper presents a system, where a model of the user’s tasks is used for automatic service composition in smart spaces. In the system service modeling is decoupled from resource modeling. We present a model for quality of service (QoS) based service composition, integrating it with our resource management scheme. A component acting on behalf of the user composes the service with the aim of maximizing the QoS for the currently active user task. This functionality is decomposed to the description and determination of static and dynamic QoS. The concept of static QoS refers to the degree of match between the requirements of the user’s active task and the qualities and capabilities of a service composition. Dynamic QoS extends static QoS by taking into account the current state and availability of the resources.

Abstract. The vision of a landscape of heterogeneous web services deployed as encapsulated business software assets in the Internet is currently becoming a reality as part of the Semantic Web. When pro-active agents handle the context-aware discovery, acquisition, composition, and management of application services and data, ensuring the security of customers ’ data becomes a principle task. To dynamically compose its offered service, an agent has to process and spread confidential data to other web services demanding the required degree of security. In this paper we propose a methodology based on type-based information flow to control the security of dynamically computed data and their proliferation to other web services. 1

Resulting from the constantly increasing usage of service oriented computing, the problem of automatic composition of services is rapidly gaining attention. Many solutions have been proposed, yet too little attention has been paid to thoroughly analyzing the different needs that require the ability of (automatic) service composition. This paper therefore aims at identifying the different cases in which service composition is needed and at classifying existing approaches accordingly. Three distinguishable types of service composition applications are described along with their basic problems and various approaches addressing the identified classes are presented.

Abstract. As the web services proliferate and complicate it is becoming an overwhelming job to manually prepare the web service compositions which describe the communication and integration between web services. This paper analyzes the usage of the Event Calculus, which is one of the logical actioneffect definition languages, for the automated preparation and execution of web service compositions. In this context, abductive planning capabilities of the Event Calculus are utilized. It is shown that composite process definitions in OWL-S can be translated into Event Calculus axioms so that planning with generic process definitions is possible within this framework.

The semantic web services composition process arranges several web services into one composite to realize complex workflows. To do this, semantic metadata of web services’ description are used. The current approaches based mainly on AI planning are immature to be used in practice. In this paper we propose an approach involving users in the semantic web services composition to help overcome problems occurring in the composition process. The basic idea is to find the users helpful in situations when preconditions are not satisfied or some input data are not available which are in demand to create a composition. 1