Web services provision is the process of assigning particular services to the constituent tasks of business processes. It describes a promising scenario where services are dynamically chosen and invoked in a business process according to their functional and non-functional capabilities. It also introduces many challenging problems and has received much attention recently. In this paper, we distinguish three types of provision: independent provision, cooperative provision and multiple provisioning. For each type, we consider three major phases, that is, service discovery, service selection and service contracting. Following this rule, we investigate existing works in web services provision and shed some light on potential research directions.
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