Service Composition: State of the art and future challenges

Service discovery and service composition constitute challenging tasks of service provisioning. Service composition is especially gaining on importance, as it can produce new composite services with features not present in the individual services. Many methods have been proposed over the years to address these issues. Simple Mobile Services (SMS) is a project aiming at creating innovative tools that will introduce a new class of mobile services enabling individuals and small businesses to become service providers. In this paper an attempt is made to present an overview of all existing techniques on service composition and examine them in the context of SMS. The enumeration of the techniques is complete and focuses mostly on recent approaches. Moreover, service composition is discussed under the prism of mass service provisioning by mobile operators where some techniques currently seem to be more suitable than others.