QoS-aware Exception Resolution for BPEL Processes: A Middleware-based Framework and Performance Evaluation

Kareliotis Christos, Costas Vassilakis, Efstathios Rouvas, Panayiotis Georgiadis
International Journal on Web and Grid Services (IJWGS), 2009 - Vol. 5, No.3 pp. 284 - 320

Abstract:
WS-BPEL is widely used nowadays for specifying and executing composite business processes within the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). During the execution however, of such business processes, a number of faults stemming from the nature of SOA (e.g. network or server failures) may occur. The WS-BPEL scenario designer must therefore use the provisions offered by WS-BPEL to catch these exceptions and resolve them, usually by invoking some equivalent web service that is expected to be reachable and available. System fault handler specification is though an additional task for the WS scenario designer, while the presence of such handlers within the scenario necessitates extra maintenance activities, as new alternate services emerge or some of the specified ones are withdrawn. In this paper, we propose a middleware-based framework for system exception resolution, which undertakes the tasks of failure interception, discovery of alternate services and their invocation. The process of selecting the alternate services to be invoked can be driven by process consumer-specified QoS policy, specifying lower and upper bounds for each QoS attribute as well as the importance of each QoS parameter. Moreover, the middleware arranges for bridging syntactic differences between the originally invoked services and functionally equivalent replacements to it, by employing XSLT-based transformations. The middleware is deployed and maintained independently of the WSBPEL scenarios, removing thus the need for specifying and maintaining system fault handlers within the scenarios. We also present performance measures, establishing that the overhead imposed by the addition of the proposed middleware layer is minimal.

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