Modeling Service Composition and Exploring its Characteristics

Service composition combines two or more services from one or multiple parties over heterogeneous networks to achieve complex computational goals taking account of user requirements of reliability, adaptability, etc. Service composition provides a powerful approach of managing complex service activities in conventional B2B, C2C, and B2C application developments. This paper re-examines and formalizes service composition with categories of service collaboration and coordination. It describes characteristics of service composition and presents the state of the art of service composition.