Dynamic generation of transactional contracts for hierarchical workflows

Abstract

Service orientation is gaining momentum in distributed software applications, mainly because it facilitates interoperability. Service composition has been acknowledged as a promising approach to meet the user demands, whenever a single service cannot fulfill the needs. It is essential to ensure the reliability of the composed service, as the component services are offered by multiple providers from different organizations. The behavioral or transactional properties of component services determine the reliability of the composite service. The guaranteed values on transactional properties of every service must be recorded in a contract as agreed by a consumer and a provider, in order to avoid unpredictable performance in service provisioning. The approach proposed in this paper enables generation of contracts at runtime along with transactional guarantees, based on the frequently changing business requirements of service consumers. The approach is experimented with a case study of Scan Report Generation in healthcare domain.