A Coloured Petri Net Analysis of the Transaction Internet Protocol

The Transaction Internet Protocol (TIP) aims to facilitate ecommerce by enforcing atomicity guarantees in transactions distributed between several autonomous transaction processing systems. In this work, the authors explore a holiday booking scenario in which a customer is protected by the TIP; in such a way as to prevent ending up with a hotel reservation without the requested flight reservation that is enclosed in the same holiday package. TIP defines an approach that makes the commit processing independent of the communication protocol used. There are a number of potential pitfalls that make it useful to provide a formal approach to reason about the behavioral properties of TIP. The authors propose a Colored Petri Net model that allows interactive simulation and verification of correctness properties within the CPN Tools modeling environment. The model can be used in the CPN Tools environment for model checking tasks.