Intent-Driven Service Substitution: Maintaining Task Continuity Under Internet Service Failure and Capability Disruption

The increasing dependence of Internet-based tasks on heterogeneous digital services, application programming interfaces (APIs), generative artificial intelligence systems, cloud platforms, and external computational capabilities introduces a fundamental challenge concerning task continuity. Although modern Internet systems can discover and invoke different services to accomplish user objectives, the failure or disruption of an actively executing service may interrupt the entire task. Such disruptions can result from service unavailability, API rate limitations, excessive response latency, unexpected pricing changes, degraded output quality, authentication failures, or changes in service capabilities. In many existing application-centered environments, users must manually identify an alternative service, reconstruct the execution context, transfer relevant information, and restart or partially repeat the interrupted operation. This creates unnecessary dependency between task completion and the availability of individual service providers. This paper proposes Intent-Driven Service Substitution (IDSS) as a conceptual framework for maintaining task continuity when Internet services become unavailable, unsuitable, or operationally constrained. Rather than treating a particular service or execution workflow as indispensable, IDSS treats the user's underlying intent as the persistent reference for determining whether an alternative service can continue the interrupted task. The framework introduces a service disruption detection mechanism, intent-oriented capability compatibility assessment, alternative service selection, execution-state transfer, quality preservation, substitution cost modeling, and continuity-aware recovery. A central component of the proposed approach is Intent-Preserving Substitution, through which the system evaluates alternative services according to their ability to preserve the original task objectives, required capabilities, input semantics, output constraints, execution state, and quality requirements. Unlike conventional service discovery, which primarily concerns identifying available services, IDSS addresses the subsequent problem of determining whether an alternative service can safely and effectively replace an interrupted service during an ongoing task. It also distinguishes service substitution from simple service retry, where the same provider or execution capability is invoked again without fundamentally changing the execution dependency. The paper further introduces an intent-oriented task continuity model, a multidimensional service compatibility model, a substitution decision function, and a state-transfer mechanism. Potential advantages include reduced provider dependency, improved execution resilience, preservation of partially completed work, greater flexibility in heterogeneous Internet environments, adaptive cost management, and reduced user intervention. These advantages are theoretically motivated and are presented as research hypotheses rather than experimentally established outcomes. The proposed framework establishes a research direction for investigating how Internet-based tasks can remain oriented toward intended outcomes despite changes in the availability, performance, cost, or suitability of individual services. The paper develops its architecture, operational mechanisms, research propositions, evaluation methodology, and implementation considerations while identifying limitations concerning semantic equivalence, state portability, security, transactional consistency, and substitution-induced quality degradation.