Publishing and composition of atomicity-equivalent services for B2B collaboration

Abstract

Exception handling resolves inconsistency by backward or forward error recovery methods or both in Business-to-Business (B2B) process collaboration. To avoid committing irrevocable tasks followed by exceptions, B2B processes, which guarantee the atomicity sphere property, are attractive. While atomicity sphere ensures its outcomes to be either all or nothing, conflicting local recoveries may lead to global B2B inconsistencies. Existing (global) analysis techniques however mandate every process unveiling all individual tasks. Such an analysis is infeasible when some business parties refuse to disclose their process details for privacy or business reasons. To address this problem, we propose a process algebraic technique to prove, construct, and check atomicity-equivalent public views from B2B processes. By checking atomicity spheres in the composition of these public views, business parties can identify suitable services that respect their individual and overall atomicity requirements. An example based on a real-life multilateral supply chain process is included.

Detection and resolution of atomicity violation in service composition

“…Processes can be composed by several basic operators, that is, "⋅", "||", and "+", representing the prefix operator, parallel composition operator and choice composition operator, respectively [16]. For example, a process p = a ⋅ q represents that after committing the action a, the process p reaches the state q.…”

“…A retriable action a, denoted as R(a) = true, can repeat itself internally without cumulative effects if the latest internal trial fails, and finally succeed after a finite number of trials; otherwise, the action is non-retriable. Informally, a process satisfies atomicity sphere if and only if (i) it does not contain any state that violates atomicity sphere (denoted by φ), and (ii) no non-retriable task is executed after a non-compensable task in any of its complete execution traces [16]. This is formalized as follows: …”

“…To check whether a service composition forms an atomicity sphere without disclosing certain selected details of involved services, our previous work [16] proposed an approach to constructing public views from their backend processes. Such a public view encapsulates tasks undesirable to expose to the public and remain atomicity-equivalent to its backend process.…”

“…These approaches [16] [17] assume no interference between service compositions. However, this assumption may not always hold.…”

Test case prioritization for regression testing of service-oriented business applications

“…To cope with changing business requirements, process engineers may modify the service-oriented business process [11][14] [26]. Testers should assure the quality of such revised applications.…”