Abstract
Service composition is a technique of forming a complex service from many individual and light-weight services or components to meet the requirements of a client. It also can be defined as a process of creating customized services from existing services by discovering, integrating and executing those services. There are many service composition systems, but most of them need a centralized manager to handle the composition. They may not be efficient and suitable for all situations. In this thesis, we present a fully distributed service composition system. The design of our system is based on a peer-to-peer model and uses a mobile agent approach to compose the services. We have implemented such a platform, called Canal. The Canal is used to develop a service composition environment in a local area. Developers can easily set up their services on the Canal to provide the composite service. In the current implementation of Canal, we provide a mobile agent approach to integrate the services and the service maintenance manager to take charge of the robustness of services.