Transaction Planning to support Coordination

Non-serializable and loosely coordinated transactions for software engineering relax ACID properties of traditional transactions to obtain flexibility. To maintain data consistency, a commonly adopted approach is to keep temporary parallel version histories, and then execute merge and negotiation procedures. We propose an alternative approach based on transaction planning. Its effect is to reduce or even avoid conflictual modification to product configurations. Transaction intention (version- and product- space) is first planned in textual descriptions expressed in TiDL (Transaction-intention Description Language), and stored in EPOSDB entities and relationships. Before execution, re-planning based on impact analysis is performed: plans are checked against currently running transactions and a reorganisation of transaction work context may be needed. Communication protocols are then chosen to suit cooperation needs. The result is to maintain flexibility and at the same time to reach opt..