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Many companies aim for reusing existing services in the construction of their busi-
ness processes. The reuse offers a great solution to increase services reliability and
reduce productivity cost [6] and [7]. In the context of discovering and composing
existing services to construct a business process, we can find an important number
of services, which share same functionality and same domain of application but has
different quality of service (Qos) [8].
In this paper, we focus on the challenge of service discovery to construct a busi-
ness process with some degrees of quality and to help business customers lacking
expertise in programming. This can be done by automating the manual steps in the
discovery and composition of services, giving quick and efficient recommendations
and providing a business process based on a set of quality service in a cloud environ-
ment. Therefore, our objective is to make a new methodology based on customer
needs (taking into consideration the requirements aspects: functional and non-
functional aspects) and based on a multi agent system with mechanisms that allow the
modeling, the discovery, the classification and the composition of services to con-
struct the business process. Moreover, we believe that, the use of cloud and agents in
the same time can be beneficial for companies to construct their business process in
safe and efficient manner.
This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces some basic concepts on
business process, cloud computing, multi-agents system, discovery and classification
of similar services. In Section 3, we present the architecture of our system and the
different phases of the construction of the business process by the multi-agent system.
After that, , in section 4 we present some related work and we discuss the approach by
presenting existing approaches limitations and detailing our contributions. Finally,
section 5 concludes this paper and presents future directions.
Basic Concepts
2
2.1
Business Process
A business process is defined as a set of tasks that represent processing steps to achieve
a business goal. Different actors that have specific roles perform these tasks. The activi-
ties of a process may be linked by resource dependencies or control dependencies
[9][9]. These tasks can be manual, partially automated or automated. The different busi-
ness activities can be joined by the flow control elements. The order of execution is
specified by the flow control element, which uses various elements such as sequential,
parallel, or alternative elements [10].
2.2
Cloud Computing
A cloud computing is a set of interconnected computers that can be represented as one
or more unified computing resource [11]. The National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST [12]) has defined clouds as follows: “cloud computing is a pay-
per-use model for enabling available, on-demand network access to a shared pool of
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