Peer-to-Peer Traced Execution of Composite Services

The connectivity generated by the Internet is opening unprecedented opportunities of automating business-to-business collaborations. As a result, organisations of all sizes are forming online alliances in order to deliver integrated value-added services. Unfortunately, due to a lack of tools and methodologies offering an adequate level of abstraction, the development of these integrated services is currently ad hoc and requires a considerable effort of low-level programming, especially when dealing with coordination, communication, and execution tracing issues. In this paper, we present a framework through which business services can be declaratively composed, and the resulting composite services can be executed in a fully traceable manner. The traces of a composite service executions are collected incrementally through peer-to-peer interactions between the involved providers. Once collected, these traces are stored as linked objects in distributed repositories, which are made available for auditing, customer feedback and quality assessment.