Information Gathering During Planning for Web Service Composition
Abstract
Hierarchical Task-Network (HTN) based planning techniques have been applied to the problem of composing Web Services, especially when described using the OWL-S service ontologies. Many of the existing Web Services are either exclusively information providing or crucially depend on information-providing services. Thus, many interesting service compositions involve collecting information either during execution or during the composition process itself. In this paper, we focus on the latter issue. In particular, we present ENQUIRER, an HTN-planning algorithm designed for planning domains in which the information about the initial state of the world may not be complete, but it is discoverable through plan-time information-gathering queries. We have shown that ENQUIRER is sound and complete, and derived several mathematical relationships among the amount of available information, the likelihood of the planner finding a plan, and the quality of the plan found. We have performed experimental tests that confirmed our theoretical results and that demonstrated how ENQUIRER can be used in Web Service composition.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2006
- Accession Number
- ADA448050
Entities
People
- Bijan Parsia
- Dana S. Nau
- Evren Sirin
- James Hendler
- Ugur Kuter
Organizations
- University of Maryland