Analysis of Non-Functional Service Properties for Transactional Workflow Management

With the encapsulation of functionality in services, many applications are nowadays built on composite Web-Services. Those are specified using workflow execution languages, such as BPEL, which represent the structure of the composition. However, they do not integrate transactional guarantees such as failure-atomicity. It is up to the application designer to define appropriate failure handling mechanisms. Transactional coordination specified for Web-Services lacks the possibility to map structural patterns of the execution semantics. In this paper, we analyze workflow patterns in the presence of non-functional (especially transactional) properties of services in order to provide appropriate forwardand backward recovery mechanisms. We identify workflow adaptations to support transactional execution in the presence of dynamic service binding. This is done by adapting the structure of the workflow and identifying non-functional preference relations for service alternatives.