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Service-oriented computing has gained significant traction in industry and academia, with major software vendors adapting their systems to meet evolving process and product demands in dynamic market environments. Despite the recognition of dynamic service binding as a core functionality since 2000, a robust industrial implementation remains elusive, primarily due to insufficient service specifications, concepts, and processing tools. This work introduces advanced concepts in service provisioning and engineering, including semantic concepts, dynamic discovery, and composition, illustrated through a concrete business use case. It presents a semantic service provisioning reference architecture framework, along with a prototypical implementation of its subsystems and a business scenario realization. By offering a coherent set of technologies and functionalities, the work surpasses current service-based software technologies, demonstrating advanced service provisioning concepts. Both the use case and provisioning platform have been validated through the EU-funded Adaptive Services Grid project, showcasing state-of-the-art research results that have undergone real industrial implementation evaluations, supported by collaboration among over 20 European partners in the field of semantic service provisioning.

It is predicted that Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) will have a high impact on future electronic business and markets. Services will provide an self-contained and standardised interface towards business and are considered as the future platform for business-to-business and business-toconsumer trades. Founded by the complexity of real world business scenarios a huge need for an easy, flexible and automated creation and enactment of service compositions is observed. This survey explores the relationship of service composition with workflow management—a technology/ concept already in use in many business environments. The similarities between the both and the key differences between them are elaborated. Furthermore methods for composition of services ranging from manual, semi- to full-automated composition are sketched. This survey concludes that current tools for service composition are in an immature state and that there is still much research to do before service composition can be used easily and conveniently in real world scenarios. However, since automated service composition is a key enabler for the full potential of Service-oriented Architectures, further research on this field is imperative. This survey closes with a formal sample scenario presented in appendix A to give the reader an impression on how full-automated service composition works.