Comparing goal-oriented and procedural service orchestration

Goals form a declarative description of the desired end result of (part of) an orchestration. A goal-oriented orchestration language is an orchestration language in which these goals are part of the language. The advantage of using goals explicitly in the language is added flexibility in handling failures. In this paper, we investigate how goal-oriented mechanisms for handling failures compare to more standard exception handling mechanisms, by providing a formally defined translation of programs in the goal-oriented orchestration language into programs in the procedural orchestration language, and proving that the procedural orchestration has the same behavior as the goal-oriented orchestration. ? This work has been partially sponsored by the project SENSORIA, IST-2005-016004.