On the Impact of Concurrency for the Enforcement of Entailment Constraints in Process-driven SOAs

Abstract

Abstract. A distributed business process is executed in a distributed computing environment. In this context, the service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm provides a mature and well understood framework for the integration of software services. Entailment constraints, such as mutual exclusion or binding constraints, are an important means to specify and enforce business processes in a SOA. However, the inherent concurrency of a distributed system may lead to omission and ordering failures. Such failures impact the enforcement of entailment constraints in a process-driven SOA. In particular, the impact of these failures as well as the corresponding countermeasures depend on the architecture of the respective process engine. In this paper, we discuss the impact of omission and ordering failures on the enforcement of entailment constraints in process-driven SOAs. In this context, we especially consider if the respective process engine acts as an orchestration engine or as a choreography engine.