Advanced Artificial Intelligence Systems for Web Services

STRAP DIT-PRJ-05-018

Status NOT active project
DISI role Coordinator
Project type Research Project
Dimension National
Acquisition date 2004-11-09
Start date 2004-01-09
End date 2006-11-08

Project details

Project astract The aim of this project is to apply advanced AI techniques and tools to realize the automated composition and verification of Web services.<br/><br/>Web services are an emerging technology that enables the interoperability among distributed, Web-accessible software components. One of the most interesting opportunities provided by Web services is that of composing different services to obtain the integration of distributed business processes. This makes it possible to develop a new model of application development, based on assembling existing Web services, rather than on developing new software by hand. To make this possibility concrete, and practically enable the composition of Web services, it is necessary to overcome some limitations in the current technology and methodology.<br/><br/>First of all, it is necessary to identify an adequate language for defining the composition in terms of the goals that it must achieve, of the requirements over the processes that will implement it, and of the mutual dependencies among the actors and services taking part to it. Moreover, advanced tools are required that support the implementation of the composition, providing advanced functionalities such as formal verification, automated synthesis, monitoring and adaptation.<br/><br/>In this project we will exploit advanced AI systems to realize these functionalities. More in detail:<br/><br/>* We will apply results from knowledge representation systems for designing a high-level specification language for Web services. Such language will allow a precise definition of the requirements of the Web servers, and a formal description of the correct behaviors of the composition. Moreover, it will define the properties over which the automated reasoning and planning functionalities will be applied.<br/><br/>* We will apply automated reasoning systems, and more specifically Model Checking techniques, to the verification and monitoring of Web service compositions. These techniques will allow detecting errors in the actual implementations of Web services against the properties which they are designed to fulfill, as well as incompatibilities against the external Web services used in the composition. These checks will be done both in the development phase (verification) and at run-time (monitoring).<br/><br/>* We will apply planning tools to support the automated composition and adaptation of Web services. More precisely, given a description of external accessible Web services (the domain), and given a description of the task to be realized by the composition (the goal), planning systems have to generate the process implementing the composition (synthesis). Also, when changes to the services or goals taking part to the composition occur, planning systems have to modify the plan accordingly (adaptation).<br/><br/>* We will develop an integrated environment where the different functionalities described above will work in combination to support the development of Web services. This environment will allow exploiting these functionalities within standard tools for the design and development of Web services.<br/><br/>* We will define a set of case studies to be used for guiding the development of the functionalities described above, and for evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed solutions. Such case studies will be based on application domains in the field of E-Government. One of the project units is working on such a domain, in collaboration with Information Technology companies.<br/><br/>
Keywords AI techniques, Web services
Fundings 143000 €
Partners
  • University of Genova
  • University of Roma "La Sapienza"
  • DIT - UniTN
  • University of Roma La Sapienza

DISI Sub-project details

Project astract The goal of this project consists in applying advanced AI techniques and tools to implement the automated composition and verification of Web services.<br/><br/>In particular, we will exploit a variety of tools and techniques developed in AI to describe and analyze complex software systems and to support their development and execution. These techniques have been developed within the following areas:<br/>* automated verification systems; these have proved very efficient for the formal validation and debugging of hardware as well as software;<br/>* automated planning systems; these allow for the automated development of operation procedures that pursue a given goal, starting from a description of the available operations;<br/>* knowledge representation systems; these provide high-level tools and languages to describe complex systems, and the knowledge that can be gathered by actors interacting with them.<br/><br/>In this project, Web services are used as a new test-bed to apply and further extend these AI tools. Indeed, Web services feature high-complexity issues in their description and development, thus requiring the application of automated techniques and tools such as those presented above.<br/><br/>The project is structured following eight phases, each phase focusing on a specific aspect of the research project:<br/>PHASE 1: Evaluation of requirement languages for Web services<br/>PHASE 2: Knowledge representation languages for Web services requirements<br/>PHASE 3: Automated reasoning systems for Web service verification<br/>PHASE 4: Automated planning systems for Web service composition<br/>PHASE 5: Definition and development of case studies<br/>PHASE 6: Integration of verification, composition, monitoring and adaptation of Web services<br/>PHASE 7: Dissemination of results<br/>PHASE 8: Coordination and project management<br/>
Keywords AI techniques, Web services
Fundings 48700 €
Manager Marco Pistore