Flexible Business Transaction Composition in Service-Oriented Environments∗

Reliability and clear semantics in the presence of errors are of key importance for automated execution of business processes. Consequently, transaction support is a major ingredient for business process automation in a Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) environment. As automated business processes become more complex, different parts of business processes have different transaction requirements. This implies that no single transaction model can accommodate for all possible transactional requirements. Therefore, we propose the Business Transaction Framework (BTF), catering for flexible composition of a variety of transaction models. Composition is supported in both a hierarchical and a choreographed way and is governed by composition rules, including inherent transaction constraints and application domain specific rules. Transaction models are represented by Abstract Transactional Constructs, which can be parameterized to tune the desired transactional behavior. Multiple composed transactions can be associated to a business process type, such that precise transaction semantics can be selected per process instance. The BTF is supported by a three-level architecture, laying the basis for flexible, transactional intraand inter-organizational business process execution on a web service based platform.