Study On Logistics Web Services Composition Based On Extended HTN Planning

Under the dual promote of economic globalization and e-commerce, strengthen theintegration of resources and optimizing the whole logistics process is the inevitabletrend of modern logistics development. Logistics Service Networking is the birth of anew logistics model in this context. It achieved the transmission of information throughthe Internet across the entire logistics operation process in distributed environment, withthe information to guide the logistics process, integrate dispersed logistics resources andachieve Logistics Service Networking. With the development of information technology,logistics companies began to apply the achievement to build the Logistics ServiceNetworking system. The complicated operation, highly input costs, unable to adapt tothe dynamic environment of Traditional EDI switching technology, network GPStechnology, XML, and other new tools, makes the degree of openness and sharing ofcurrent service network logistics system is not very satisfactory, large-scale applicationwas also under restricted. Web service composition technology for its technical and costadvantages provides us a new way for Logistics Service Networking.In this paper, we proposed a Logistics Web Service Composition Model based onthe extended HTN planning, which means that logistics service is formally described asWeb services and composed through Web services composition technologies underdistributed environment. However, to realize the logistics Web service composition, weare bound to face three problems:①The unified formal description of Logistics Webservices and the establishment of logistics needs templates;②The discovery andmatching of Logistics Web services, namely to choose required Web services from alarge number of Web services which meets the constraints of the logistic Web services.③Logistics Web service composition. How to composite Web service units inaccordance with the needs of the upcoming execution sequence, and ensure the bestoverall service portfolio. This paper addresses these issues from the following aspects:①We build a general logistics Web service composition framework based on Webservices general framework. The service composition process is divided into four parts,including logistics needs analysis, service discovery and composition, servicecomposition execution monitoring and the feedback procedure of the implementation.②We designed the similarity calculation of the parameters given in the form of the concept, interval, fuzzy function as the basis of logistics services matching.③Weestablished a logistics Web service composition process to deal with Web servicesconflict and logistics demand, and feedback procedure adapting to the dynamic changesof Web services.④We expanded the HTN task planning method through introducingdomain knowledge and planning process control into the description of Task Network,making the Task Network description can express time, resources and satisfactionconstraints. And apply the extended HTN planning to composite Logistics Web Services.In the planning process, Logistic Needs planning and service matching were executedsimultaneously, filtering unsatisfied programming branches, narrowing planning space,improving planning efficiency.Finally, according to Logistics Web Service Composition Process based on theextended HTN planning, we developed a planning system based on the classic SHOP2HTN planning engine on the secondary development, to analysis and verify our model.