Formal Model for Business - aware Transaction Management ∗ Francois

Currently, Service Based Applications (SBAs) concentrate on composing software services into business processes. However, a few languages explicitly define business artifacts [6] including critical business activities, business events, business data, QoS requirements and SLAs. This is surprising since end-toend processes typically involve well defined standard processes or segments( (eg. payment processing, shipping and tracking....). Additionnally, SLA is a key concept in end-to-end processes. Furthermore, no well defined language enables an holistic (choreographic) description of these necessarily related granular business tenets in an end-to-end process constellation [19]. However this is critical for obtaining a reliable message level protocol, tackling monitoring issues, and enabling reuse. Last, although declarative languages exist for service composition [17] to tackle flexibility issue and reuse, they are not business aware and do not emphasize on the key concept of transaction and SLAs [19] for SBA. However Business Transaction and SLAs concepts often need to be declarative [20], [5], [19] and seems convenient for reuse. To illustrate some of the above remarks, we considere the standard BPEL [18] and a current technique for monitoring and recovery. In BPEL, focus is on messages and control flow rather than on active business object [6]. But business analyst may wish focusing only on the effect of business transaction such as ” Shipping” on corresponding real object such as ”good” (standed by a business object), rather than dealing systematically with the manipulation of numerous Business document (or attributes) aliases while sending messages. Enforcing message dependencies should be presented as an enactement of a stronger declarative business goal. Moreover, different encoding may satisfy business requirement. For instance, it is not possible to specify in a direct way in BPEL the business compliance pattern of ”prerequisite” wich means that, the absence of one activity implies that another is also absent. Last, The ” mixing” of SAGA style [9] with fault-handler mechanism coming from programing community (C++, Java) [18], is an ad-hoc approach [12]. Furthermore, BPEL does not tackle decentralized distributed transactional coordination mechanism. In [3], monitoring techniques enable separation between monitoring data from analysis. However, the business artifact dependencies maps, are not considered as a