Development of a mobile web services discovery and composition model Cheyma Ben Njima 1,2 • Youssef Gamha 1 • Chirine Ghedira Guegan 2 • Lotfi Ben Romdhane 1 Received: 6 January 2018 / Revised: 26 July 2018 / Accepted: 31 December 2018 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract Mobile computing, a challenging paradigm aiming at using and providing services anywhere and anytime, places great challenges on dynamic service discovery and composition. These challenges are specially related to mobile context (terminal constraints, user mobility, network connection, etc.) In fact, the discovery model began with semantically rewriting and enriching services and user query with OWL-S ontology and its non-functional properties (context, QoWS and user preferences). Then a similarity calculation step has been performed between the enriched user query and the set of advertised web services to generate the most relevant ones. Furthermore, the resulting services will be the inputs of a mobile web service composition process. Mobile web service composition is based on a formal model aiming to compute dynamic context (Location, Bandwidth) uncertainty and web service sensitivity. These values contribute to select web services that will form the composition plan. The web service composition algorithm suggests to the end user, the most relevant plans sorted in ascending order according to their total sensitivity value. The implementation and comprehensive simulation experiments show the efficiency of the mobile web service discovery and composition models. Keywords Mobile web services  Dynamic context  Semantic discovery  Composition  Uncertainty  Web service sensitivity 1 Introduction and related work Mobile web service is the combination of mobile networks and web services [1]. Mobile web services are the access and invocation of web services via mobile devices. These devices have even contributed in transforming users’s behaviors and habits. User’s requirements are changing and becoming more complex with new technologies. The information has become portable and accessible anywhere and anytime and the need for mobile web services has increased, imposing to consider several constraints termi- nal constraints, user’s mobility, network connection, etc. During the last decades, the main lines of research have been linked to the notion of context and more specifically to context-aware web service discovery and composition. So, the discovery of mobile web services can be defined by the ability to use context information to discover the most appropriate web services for the customer in relation to the offered service. Also, it is essential to automatically dis- cover services that have well-defined capabilities to per- form specific tasks and prepare the composing process later. To ensure this, it is important that the web services search system infrastructure provide a detailed description of the features offered by the available services and that is intelligible and more machine-understandable to facilitate dynamic search and find the right services. To achieve these goals, the research community has exploited semantic web technologies to enrich web services with semantic descriptions such as ontologies (OWL-S, WSMO, ect.) [2]. This semantic description allows for an automatic and dynamic discovery and composition process. However, basic web services are unable to accomplish complex goals. For example, a person who wants to plan a business trip for which it is necessary to book a plane ticket, a room in an hotel, a car to move easily in the city and a table in a restaurant for dinner. Since this is a special and & Cheyma Ben Njima bennjimacheima@yahoo.fr 1 Mars Research Lab, University of Sousse, Sousse, Tunisia 2 Magellan, University Lyon 3, Lyon, France 123 Cluster Computing https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-018-02904-y