Abstract
Web services have become an emerging and promising technology to design and build complex business applications out of atomic web-based software components. To enforce extensive software reuse and dynamic adaptation, dynamic service composition has experienced an increasing interest in research efforts. Together, the lack of a general conceptual reference model for dynamic web service composition systems and the widespread use of these systems in service-enabled applications constitute a problem of management for these systems. To capture the requirements and challenges of these composition systems, a survey of a representative set of these systems is presented. In this paper, we develop a reference model for describing the functional structure and evaluating the performance of dynamic web service composition systems based on existing dynamic web service composition platforms and prototypes. To the best of our knowledge there has been no such model in the literature.