Solúbtha : a model for designing flexible business transactions of purchase order management processes

With the advent of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), organizations tend to use service-based applications (SBAs) that are dynamic, distributed, and ubiquitous. In recent years, SBAs have become the state of the art technologies for building large-scale and cost-effective applications on the web. SBAs that automate end-to-end business processes typically involve well–defined standard composite activities that are hosted at the sites of business partners. These activities encapsulate one to many operations. A business transaction is the successful execution of these operations that must satisfy the trading partners agreements which contain the clauses agreed upon by the business partners. In order to ensure the agreement is satisfied during operations, business transactions have to be designed by correlating agreements. Furthermore, business transactions are collaborative, distributed, and long-running and thus they are prone to failure. Therefore, flexibility is a paramount importance for business transactions. A business transaction model should provide design-elements and techniques to design highly flexible business transactions by correlating the trading partner agreements. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of a model that enables designing flexible business transactions by correlating the business perspective elements with the functional perspective elements. Existing business transaction models provide a limited number of design–elements and techniques. None of the existing business transaction models are able to provide the necessary and sufficient design-elements and techniques. Accordingly, there is a strong need for a business transaction model which is capable of addressing these shortcomings. This research has developed Solúbtha business transaction model that enables designing business transactions by correlating the business and functional perspective of end-to-end purchase order management processes. Additionally, this thesis has extended the theory of classical atomic behaviour of business transactions to enable designing highly–flexible behaviour of business transactions. The model is built on five properties: fault-tolerance, failure-resiliency, operational autonomy, non-determinism, and extensibility, which are the basic building blocks of flexible behaviour of business transactions. The model is capable of providing recovery operators and other elements that are needed for implementing these properties.