Consolidation of process models that interact via compensation handlers

Abstract

Choreographies are generally used to model the interaction behaviour between the processes of different organizations and their suppliers. At times organizations make some business decisions like gaining more control over their suppliers and minimizing the transactional costs leading to the insourcing of these companies. This in turn causes the organization to merge the partner’s processes with its own. In previous work an approach has been proposed to consolidate i.e. integrate interacting BPEL process models of different partners into a single BPEL process model by deriving control flow links between the process models from their interaction specification. The resulting merged BPEL process model may contain errors related to the derived control flow links in case of the BPEL constructs such as Fault Handler, Compensation Handler, Termination Handler and Event Handler (FCTE- Handler). The focus of this thesis is to identify any control flow links violations in case of Compensation Handlers (CH) and resolve them. To achieve that, different scenarios have been identified wherein control flow link violations might occur for CH interacting with partner processes and a solution for each has been provided. The solution proposes an approach to emulate the behaviour of CH where any control link violation occurs thus resulting into a final merged BPEL process model containing no violations associated with CH but having the exact same behaviour.