Ensuring conformance in an evolving choreography

Abstract

Choreography models provide structure for overall behavioral constraints and capture the context of the implementing services. Choreography models, however, are not static and evolve as business partners change over time.In order to increase the robustness of these, typically interorganizational, business processes, we propose to make services adaptive to these kinds of changes. In this paper, we present a model-based approach on how choreographic changes can be automatically resolved in the implementing orchestration. We demonstrate our conceptual approach by providing an implementation that adapts an orchestrator to changes in the ordering of business objectives.

A systematic literature review of service choreography adaptation

“…A good example of model transformation usage is provided by Mahfouz et al [48], in which models representing the global choreography, local orchestrations, and business requirements evolve in a coordinated way: updating one model triggers dynamic adaptation in the other models, avoiding inconsistencies among the models. In total, we grouped nine studies [2,5,10,48,19,8,6,13] into this category.…”

“…Hiel et al [10] make service orchestrations adaptive to choreography changes based on a model in which developers specify what should be achieved by which partner, rather than how this should be reached. Adaptability is enabled through more flexible service compositions, for which developers specify only key information to be exchanged in the choreography.…”

“…They separate and coordinate these aspects in runtime by using two interacting engines: a workflow engine for orchestration and a protocol engine for choreography. Moreover, Hiel et al [10] define choreography as a contract to which business partners should adhere, and as a (global) perspective to assist developers in creating inter-organizational processes.…”

“…Underlying models: identified notations in this category were UML [8,13]; ACDL [48], which is based on WS-CDL; Aspect-Sensitive Process, WS-CDL and the XML-based ECL [5]; BPMN2, BPEL and BPEL4Chor [6]; and a graphical model provided by the OperA tool [10], which enables developers to specify choreographies at a high level of abstraction. It is worth to note that every study in this category has clearly defined an underlying choreography model, except for Georgiana et al [19].…”