Verifying transactional requirements of web service compositions using temporal logic templates

Lecture notes in computer science, 2013, vol. 8180 LNCS (Part 1)Ensuring reliability in Web service compositions is of crucial interest as services are composed and executed in long-running, distributed mediums that cannot guarantee reliable communications. Towards this, transactional behavior has been proposed to handle and undo the effects of faults of individual components. Despite significant research interest, challenges remain in providing an easy-to-use, formal approach to verify transactional behavior of Web service compositions before costly development. In this paper, we propose the use of temporal logic templates to specify component-level and composition-level transactional requirements over a Web service composition. These templates are specified using a simple format, configured according to scope and cardinality, and automatically translated into temporal logic. To verify design conformance to a set of implemented templates, we employ model checking. We propose an algorithm to address state space explosion by reducing the models into semantically equivalent Kripke structures. Our approach facilitates the implementation of expressive transactional behavior onto existing complex services, as demonstrated in our experimental study.Scott Bourne, Claudia Szabo, and Quan Z. Shen

The Atomic Manifesto: a Story in Four Quarks

This report summarizes the viewpoints and insights gathered in the Dagstuhl Seminar on Atomicity in System Design and Execution, which was attended by 32 people from four different scientific communities: database and transaction processing systems, fault tolerance and dependable systems, formal methods for system design and correctness reasoning, and hardware architecture and programming languages. Each community presents its position in interpreting the notion of atomicity and the existing state of the art, and each community identifies scientific challenges that should be addressed in future work. In addition, the report discusses common themes across communities and strategic research problems that require multiple communities to team up for a viable solution. The general theme of how to specify, implement, compose, and reason about extended and relaxed notions of atomicity is viewed as a key piece in coping with the pressing issue of building and maintaining highly dependable systems that comprise many components with complex interaction patterns

Modelling long-lived health care workflow transactions

Due to the increasing automation of health care, health care work ows have received signi cant attention over the last few years. This paper discusses the di erences between typical business processes and health care work ows, and introduces a layered architecture suitable for health care work ow models.We present a rules-based approach for mod- elling long-lived health care work ow transactions, and we discuss a set of transactional integrity rules speci c to the work ow patterns found in traditional business processes and show how these rules can be used to design health care work ows with transactional characteristics.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Modelling long-lived health care workflow transactions

Due to the increasing automation of health care, health care work ows have received signi cant attention over the last few years. This paper discusses the di erences between typical business processes and health care work ows, and introduces a layered architecture suitable for health care work ow models.We present a rules-based approach for mod- elling long-lived health care work ow transactions, and we discuss a set of transactional integrity rules speci c to the work ow patterns found in traditional business processes and show how these rules can be used to design health care work ows with transactional characteristics.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

On Atomic Batch Executions in Stream Processing

AbstractStream processing is about processing continuous streams of data by programs in a workflow. Continuous execution is discretized by grouping input stream tuples into batches and using one batch at a time for the execution of programs. As source input batches arrive continuously, several batches may be processed in the workflow simultaneously. A general requirement is that each batch be processed completely in the workflow. That is, all the programs triggered by the batch, directly and transitively, in the workflow must be executed successfully. Executing only a prefix of the workflow amounts to dropping (discarding) the batches that were derived by the executed part and were supposed to be input to the rest of the workflow. In some cases, such partial executions may not be acceptable and may have to be rolled back, amounting to dropping the source input batches that were processed by the partial execution. We refer to this property of processing the batches either completely or not at all as atomic execution of the batches. We also attribute the property to the batches themselves, calling them atomic batches, meaning that the property applies to the set of transactions that are executed due to that batch. If batches are processed in isolation in the workflow, preserving atomicity is fairly straightforward. When batches are split or merged along the workflow computation, the problem becomes complicated. In this paper, we study issues relating to the atomicity of batches. We illustrate that, in general, preserving atomicity of some batches may affect the atomicity of some other batches, and suggest trade-offs

Towards an Enhanced Protocol for Improving Transactional Support in Interoperable Service Oriented Application-Based (SOA-Based) Systems

When using a shared database for distributed transactions, it is often difficult to connect business processes and softwarecomponents running on disparate platforms into a single transaction. For instance, one platform may add or update data, and thenanother platform later access the changed or added data. This severely limits transactional capabilities across platforms. Thissituation becomes more acute when concurrent transactions with interleaving operations spans across different applications andresources. Addressing this problem in an open, dynamic and distributed environment of web services poses special challenges,and still remains an open issue. Following the broad adoption and use of the standard Web Services Transaction Protocols,requirements have grown for the addition of extended protocols to handle problems that exist within the context of interoperableservice-oriented applications. Most extensions to the current standard WS-Transaction Protocols still lack proper mechanisms forerror-handling, concurrency control, transaction recovery, consolidation of multiple transaction calls into a single call, and securereporting and tracing for suspicious activities. In this research, we will first extend the current standard WS-TransactionFramework, and then propose an enhanced protocol (that can be deployed within the extended framework) to improvetransactional and security support for asynchronous applications in a distributed environment. A hybrid methodology whichincorporates service-oriented engineering and rapid application development will be used to develop a procurement system(which represents an interoperable service-oriented application) that integrates our proposed protocol. We will empiricallyevaluate and compare the performance of the enhanced protocol with other conventional distributed protocols (such as 2PL) interms of QoS parameters (throughput, response time, and resource utilization), availability of the application, databaseconsistency, and effect of locking on latency, among other factors.Keywords: Database, interoperability, security, concurrent transaction, web services, protocol, service-oriente

Enabling One-Phase Commit (1PC) Protocol for Web Service Atomic Transaction (WS-AT)

Business transactions (a.k.a., business conversations) are series of message exchanges that occur between software applications coordinating to achieve a business objective. Web service has been proven to be a promising technology in supporting business transactions. Business transaction can either be long-running or short-lived. A transaction whether in a database or web service paradigm consists of an “all-or-nothing” property. A transaction could either succeed or fail. Web Service Atomic Transactions (WS-AT) is a specification that currently supports Two-Phase Commit (2PC) protocol in a short-lived transaction. WS-AT is developed by OASIS–a standards development organization. However, not all business process scenarios require a 2PC, in that case, just a One-Phase Commit (1PC) would be sufficient. But unfortunately, WS-AT currently does not support 1PC optimization. The ideal scenario where 1PC can be used instead of 2PC is when there is only a single participant. Short-lived transactions involving only one participant can commit without requiring initial “prepare” phase. Thus, there is no overhead to check whether the participant is prepared to either commit or rollback. This research focuses on designing a mechanism that can add 1PC support in WS-AT. The technical implementation of this mechanism is developed by using JBoss Transaction API. As a part of this thesis, 1PC mechanism for a single participant scenario was implemented. This mechanism optimizes the web service transaction process in terms of overhead and performance in terms of execution time. The technical implementation solution for 1PC mechanism was evaluated using three different business process scenarios in a controlled experiment as a presence or absence test. Evaluation results show that 1PC mechanism has a lower mean for execution time and performed significantly better than 2PC mechanism. Based on the contributions made by this thesis, we recommend OASIS to consider including 1PC mechanism as a part of the WS-AT specification