http://www.computer.org/tsc IEEE Transactions on Services Computing will emphasize the algorithmic, mathematical, statistical and computational methods that are central in services computing; the emerging field of Service Oriented Architecture, Web Services, Business Process Integration, Solution Performance Management, Services Operations and Management. Specifically, this new title covers but not limited to the following topics: a) Mathematical foundation of Services Computing; b) Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA); c) Service creation, development, and management; d) Linkage between IT services and business services; e) Web services security and privacy; f) Web services agreement and contract; g) Web services discovery and negotiation; h) Web services management; i) Web services collaboration; j) Quality of Service for Web Services; k) Web services modeling and performance management; l) Solution frameworks for building service-oriented applications; m) Composite Web service creation and enabling infrastructures; n) Business and scientific applications using Web services and SOA; o) Business process integration and management using Web Services; p) Standards and specifications of Services Computing; q) Utility Models and Solution Architectures; r) Resource acquisition models in Utility Computing; s) Mathematical foundation of business process modeling, integration and management; t) Business process modeling, integration, and collaboration. It is noted that only Web service-oriented Grid computing will be covered by Services Computing. Services Computing does not cover most of the topics in traditional Grid computing areas (i.e. computing resource sharing and parallel computing). en-us Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:00:01 GMT http://csdl.computer.org/common/images/logos/tsc.gif List of recently published journal articles http://www.computer.org/tsc http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TSC.2008.1 The main research focus of Web services is to achieve the interoperability between distributed and heterogeneous applications. Therefore, flexible composition of Web services to fulfill the given challenging requirements is one of the most important objectives in this research field. However, until now, service composition has been largely an error-prone and tedious process. Furthermore, as the number of available web services increases, finding the right Web services to satisfy the given goal becomes intractable. In this paper, toward these issues, we propose an AI planning-based framework that enables the automatic composition of Web services, and explore the following issues. First, we formulate the Web-service composition problem in terms of AI planning and network optimization problems to investigate its complexity in detail. Second, we analyze publicly available Web service sets using network analysis techniques. Third, we develop a novel Web-service benchmark tool called WSBen. Fourth, we develop a novel AI planning-based heuristic Web-service composition algorithm named WSPR. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to verify WSPR against state-of-the-art AI planners. It is our hope that both WSPR and WSBen will provide useful insights for researchers to develop Web-service discovery and composition algorithms, and software. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TSC.2008.1