As a promising, few-risk, low-cost, and agile way to rapidly produce and construct executable intended software, in recent years automatic service composition related techniques and methods have been a prevailing and deeply-studied research field, receiving a lot of attentions. For this research field, upon our long-term studies and efforts as well as papers reviewed we present, in this article, a technical profound survey along with the future challenges and directions observed. Before the main body of the survey appears, there are introductions to some vital background knowledge and adopted survey framework, respectively. The framework used in organizing the structure of the survey has been aided and inspired by aspect-oriented paradigm.