Precise Modelling of Compensating Business Transactions and its Application to BPEL

Michael Butler (School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK)

Carla Ferreira (Department of Computer Science, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal)

Muan Yong Ng (School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, United Kingdom)

Abstract: We describe the StAC language which can be used to specify the orchestration of activities in long running business transactions. Long running business transactions use compensation to cope with exceptions. StAC supports sequential and parallel behaviour as well as exception and compensation handling. We also show how the B notation may be combined with StAC to specify the data aspects of transactions. The combination of StAC and B provides a rich formal notation which allows for succinct and precise specification of business transactions. BPEL is an industry standard language for specifying business transactions and includes compensation constructs. We show how a substantial subset of BPEL can be mapped to StAC thus demonstrating the expressiveness of StAC and providing a formal semantics for BPEL.

Keywords: B method, compensation, formal specification, language semantics, long-running transactions

Categories: D.3.1, F.3.2, H.m