JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science 11(5): 712-743, doi: 10.3217/jucs-011-05-0712
Precise Modelling of Compensating Business Transactions and its Application to BPEL
expand article infoMichael Butler‡, Carla Ferreira§, Muan Yong Ng‡
‡ School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Highfield, United Kingdom§ Department of Computer Science, Technical University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

Corresponding author: Michael Butler ( mjb@ecs.soton.ac.uk )

© Michael Butler, Carla Ferreira, Muan Ng.
This article is freely available under the J.UCS Open Content License.
Citation: Butler M, Ferreira C, Ng MY (2005) Precise Modelling of Compensating Business Transactions and its Application to BPEL. JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science 11(5): 712-743. https://doi.org/10.3217/jucs-011-05-0712
Open Access
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
long-running transactions, compensation, language semantics, formal specification, B method