Automated Web Service Composition at Work: the Amazon/MPS Case Study

Several works address the problem of the automated composition of stateful services, e.g., specified in WS-BPEL. However, the key problem of their practical applicability in real composition scenarios is still open. Addressing this problem requires to provide an easy and affordable way to specify behaviors of component services and composition requirements, as well as composition techniques that are powerful enough to scale to scenarios of realistic size. In this paper we provide a first step towards addressing this problem by evaluating the feasibility and efficiency of a state-of-the art approach to automating the composition task on a real scenario that entails a high level of complexity: the Amazon E-Commerce Services and an e-payment service offered by an important Italian banking Group (Monte dei Paschi di Siena). We show the feasibility of the specification of composition requirements and of the automated generation of complex executable WS-BPEL processes, and analyze the possibility of reducing the effort in the composition task.