Process algebraic support for web service composition

Abstract

Web services technology provides a platform on which we can develop distributed services. The interoperability among these services is achieved by various standard protocols. In recent years, several researches suggested that process algebras provide a satisfactory assistance to the whole process of web services development. Business transactions, on the other hand, involve the coordination and interaction between multiple partners. With the emergence of web services, business transactions are conducted using these services. The coordination among the business processes is crucial, so is the handling of faults that can arise at any stage of a transaction. Compensation is an error recovery mechanism to handle faults in business transactions. Compensating CSP (cCSP) is a language defined to model business transactions within the framework of standard CSP process algebra. The language defines a transaction as a process and has the constructs for orchestration of compensations. In this short note, we report a case study showing how cCSP can be used to model business transactions. We also show a mechanical verification technique to verify theoretical properties of the language