Composing Web-service-like Abstract State Machines (ASMs)

Abstract

Abstract. We ease the design of collaborative business processes respecting desired business goals by the composition algorithm presented in this paper. The composition of multiple parties' business processes is always done with a specific objective in mind. Not only in the positive case, but also if the objective of a business process can not be fulfilled, all participating business processes need to be in some expected recovery state. We propose a composition algorithm solving the task of designing a collaborative business process while respecting a set of primary and recovery goals. In our model, each business process is described as a finite state machine. The multiplication of all business processes in one single model of possible executions would lead to an explosion of the number of states. Therefore, our composition algorithm directly interprets the multiple finite state machine (FSM) representations and creates a collaborative business process without integrating all FSMs into one single FSM upfront. Our composition algorithm returns an orchestration of the given business processes only in the case that it can be assured that each execution only leads to an expected primary or recovery goal. In order to prove our concepts, we first mathematically define the execution of business processes and orchestrations by providing abstract state machine (ASM) representations for them. Second, we execute the ASMs in the execution engine CoreASM which shows that the generated orchestration steers the execution of the business processes as intended.

Executable formal specifications of complex distributed systems with CoreASM

“…Altenhofen and Börger [27] analyze a given cluster protocol implementation using an abstract ASM model, which they refine into an executable CoreASM model for running scenarios. Lemcke and Friesen at SAP Germany [28] propose a Web services composition algorithm for collaborative business processes defined in terms of a distributed ASM, using CoreASM for executing their ASM model to show that the generated orchestration steers the execution of the business processes as intended. Beckers et.…”

A Computational Logic Application Framework for Service Discovery and Contracting

“…Another related work about composition is Friesen and Lemcke (2007), where the authors, inspired by Pistore et al (2005), describe a composition algorithm that generates correct Web services composition respecting userdefined goals.…”

“…Our work can be compared to Pistore et al (2005) and Friesen and Lemcke (2007) since it shares their advantages even if, at the technical level, our work differs from them in the kind of information that we represent and store in the knowledge level (IC logic-based constraints instead of transition rules or finite state machine) as well as in the automatic technique we use (SCIFF abductive proof procedure instead of planning or an ad hoc combination algorithm). Behavioural interfaces described as IC allow, in fact, a more detailed description of web-services behaviour with respect to the functional one and the use of them allows a very rich description of them without any limitation to the range of variables used.…”