A discovery method of service-correlation for service composition in virtual enterprise

With the increasingly fierce market competition and rapid development of information technology, as a new organisation, virtual enterprise (VE) emerges from the business process of single enterprise. Service composition, which can realise the added value of service, is the core to implement a VE. Considering that there always exist correlations among services, which can affect the service composition. Hence, how to find the correlations between two services and apply them to service composition is a key issue. This paper presents the formalised description for correlations between two services, and designs discovery algorithms of service-correlation to find what kind of correlations two services have. A case study illustrates the application of the proposed discovery algorithms. The effectiveness of proposed service-correlation discovery algorithm is demonstrated through simulation experiment. [Received 28 September 2011; Revised 28 March 2012; Revised 28 September 2012; Accepted 17 March 2013]