increasingly becoming a business imperative today. Application development is often done in an ad hoc manner, without standard frameworks or libraries, thus resulting in poor reuse of software assets. Web services have received much interest in industry due to their potential in facilitating seamless business-to-business or enterprise application integration. A web services composition tool can help automate the process, from creating business process functionality, to developing executable workflows, to deploying them on an execution environment. However, we find that the main approaches taken thus far to standardize and compose web services are piecemeal and insu#cient. The business world has adopted a (distributed) programming approach in which web service instances are described using WSDL, composed into flows with a language like BPEL and invoked with the SOAP protocol. Academia has propounded the AI approach of formally representing web service capabilities in ontologies, and reasoning about their composition using goal-oriented inferencing techniques from planning. We present the first integrated work in composing web services end to end from specification to deployment by synergistically combining the strengths of the above approaches. We describe a prototype service creation environment along with a use-case scenario, and demonstrate how it can significantly speed up the time-tomarket for new services.

Abstract — The vision of an Ecology of Physically Embedded Intelligent Systems, or PEIS-Ecology, combines insights from the fields of autonomous robotics and ambient intelligence to provide a new approach to building robotic systems in the service of people. In this paper, we present this vision, and we report the results of a four-year collaborative research project between Sweden and Korea aimed at the concrete realization of this vision. We focus in particular on three results: a robotic middleware able to cope with highly heterogeneous systems; a technique for autonomous self-configuration and reconfiguration; and a study of the problem of sharing information of both physical and digital nature. I.

Abstract — In recent years business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce has been subject to major rethinking. A paradigm shift from document centric file-based interchange of business information to process-centric and service-based information exchange can be observed. On a business level, a lot of work has been done to capture business models and collaborative business processes of an enterprise. On a technical level, the focus in software development is moving towards service-oriented architectures (SOA). These transitions on both levels promise a market entry at lower costs and an easier adjustment to changing market conditions. Hence, an overwhelming quantity of specifications and approaches emerged in the past targeting the area of B2B- these are partly competing and overlapping. In this paper, we provide a survey of the most promising ones at both levels and classify them using the Open-edi reference model standardized by ISO. Furthermore, we discuss how individual specifications on different levels fit together- starting from business models via business processes to artifacts ready for deployment. I.

As the number of available web services proliferates, finding right web services to fulfill a given goal becomes an important task. In particular, a problem of combining multiple web services to satisfy a single task, known as web services composition problem, has received much attention recently, and various solutions have been proposed. Among many proposed solutions, however, it is not clear to use which one in what scenarios. In this paper, to this end, we present: (1) a taxonomy and decision guideline of available solution spaces; (2) an overview of syntactic and semantic matching approaches, and (3) a comparative illustration of three representative solutions from the perspective of e-service workflows.

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:

Imagine the following situation. You give your favorite robot, named Pippi, the task to fetch a parcel that just arrived at your front door. While pushing the parcel back to you, she must travel through a door opening. Unfortunately, the parcel she is pushing is blocking her camera, giving her a hard time to see the door to cross. If she cannot see the door, she cannot safely push the parcel through the door opening. What would you as a human do in a similar situation? Most probably you would ask someone for help, someone to guide you through the door, as we ask for help when we need to park our car in a tight parking spot. Why not let the robots do the same? Why not let robots help each other? Luckily for Pippi, there is another robot, named Emil, vacuum cleaning the floor in the same room. Since Emil can view both Pippi and the door at the same time, he can guide Pippi through the door, enabling her to deliver the parcel to you. This work is about societies of autonomous robots in which robots can

Abstract. The concept of Ecology of Physically Embedded Intelligent Systems, or Peis-Ecology, combines insights from the fields of ubiquitous robotics and ambient intelligence to provide a new solution to building intelligent robots in the service of people. While this concept provides great potential, it also presents a number of new scientific challenges. The Peis-Ecology project is an ongoing collaborative project between Swedish and Korean researchers which addresses these challenges. In this paper we introduce the concept of Peis-Ecology, discuss its potential and its challenges, and present our current steps toward its realization. We also point to experimental results that show the viability of this concept. 1

Abstract. The fast emergence and acceptance of service oriented architectures leads to fast development of extensional technologies like service delivery, discovery and composition. As main effort is being spent on automatic discovery and composition, current solutions do not reflect real world scenarios sufficiently. Services are offered by different vendors with different quality levels and prices. Large service oriented architectures with dynamic service compositions are not able to adapt without manual inspection of service quality and negotiation of service contracts. We propose an ontology for modelling Quality of Services (QoS) and Service-Level-Agreements (SLA). A semantic approach should bridge the gap of different terminology, languages and metrics making Service-Level offers and requests agent understandable and automatic quality-aware discovery possible. 1

Abstract. We ease the design of collaborative business processes respecting desired business goals by the composition algorithm presented in this paper. The composition of multiple parties ’ business processes is always done with a specific objective in mind. Not only in the positive case, but also if the objective of a business process can not be fulfilled, all participating business processes need to be in some expected recovery state. We propose a composition algorithm solving the task of designing a collaborative business process while respecting a set of primary and recovery goals. In our model, each business process is described as a finite state machine. The multiplication of all business processes in one single model of possible executions would lead to an explosion of the number of states. Therefore, our composition algorithm directly interprets the multiple finite state machine (FSM) representations and creates a collaborative business process without integrating all FSMs into one single FSM upfront. Our composition algorithm returns an orchestration of the given business processes only in the case that it can be assured that each execution only leads to an expected primary or recovery goal. In order to prove our concepts, we first mathematically define the execution of business processes and orchestrations by providing abstract state machine (ASM) representations for them. Second, we execute the ASMs in the execution engine CoreASM which shows that the generated orchestration steers the execution of the business processes as intended. 1

Abstract — A novel optimisation technique inspired by natural ecosystems is presented, where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of services which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. Through this twofold process, the local search is accelerated and will yield better local optima, because the distributed optimisation already provides a good sampling of the search space by making use of computations already performed in other peers with similar constraints. We call this new distributed optimisation architecture a Digital Ecosystem, an Ecosystem Orientated Architecture (EOA) created by extending a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) with Distributed Evolutionary