Transactional Coordination Research Articles

“Putting culture in the middle”: A transactional reconstruction

ABSTRACT This paper revisits Michael Cole’s influential Cultural Psychology. The goal is to reconstruct Cole by putting him into critical and creative dialogue with John Dewey’s theory of transaction. It explores four advantages that arise by reconstructing Cole as a fully consistent Darwinian naturalist understood in terms of an equally consistent Deweyan transactionalism. One advantage is that transactional coordination can replace Cole’s reliance on mediation. Second, one can recognize potentiality as a category of existence. Third, it becomes easier for Cole to engage the embodied aspects of mental functioning. Finally, transactionalism overcomes Cole’s residual culture versus nature dualism.

Theory of analysis of the innovative ecosystems development

The ecosystem approach makes a significant contribution to understanding the current transformations of socio-economic life. New end-to-end technologies have a high potential to minimize the transaction sector in order to focus on meeting the real needs of people and firms and forming economic, political, cultural, and value institutions for sustainable development and justice for all. It seems that the technological breakthroughs of recent years, as well as the reverse pandemic economic dynamics, provide ample opportunities for the spread of innovative ecosystems as a new form of coordination of production activities. The unique characteristics of ecosystems as predominantly self-organizing communities allow us to identify a number of conceptual approaches to the analysis of their development: network, system, digital, stakeholder, and transactional. The objectives of the article do not include their detailed presentation. We show the applicability of approaches for ecosystem analysis. Based on the description of the options and possibilities for the applicability of these approaches, we came to the conclusion that the nature of innovative ecosystems is dual. First, the latter allow us to model (structure, systematize) interorganizational, inter-firm relations in a new way, to identify ecosystem features of communities, industrial and regional complexes. Second, ecosystems need to be recognized as a new form of transactional coordination of economic activity. They are alternatives to institutions such as the firm, the market, and hybrid forms. The increment of scientific knowledge consists in the implementation of the main goal of the study -the systematization of methods for analyzing the development of innovative ecosystems based on the formation of ideas for ecosystem analysis of innovation management.

Tx-FAITH

A key challenge in B2B and B2C applications involving dynamic composition of workflow activities is to ensure their reliable execution, in view of frequent failures in the internet environment where a composed service is executed. Existing approaches for transactional coordination of composite web services, consider forward and backward recovery alone, in order to maintain consistency in the case of failures. However, while achieving reliable execution, service cancellability is important due to the predominance of long running processes in business applications and frequently changing user requirements and business policies. If the execution of a long running process is not cancelled in the case of a changed requirement, the completion of the process results in wastage of resources and the outcome may no longer be useful. Hence, a transactional coordination framework named as Tx-FAITH is proposed to handle the cancellation recovery under the external interruption and cancellation of transactions. Tx-FAITH considers hierarchically composed web services whose components are recursively nested to form a composition and adapts a coordination approach based on context information. The proposed coordination and recovery approach when tested with 200 simultaneous users and with a database size of 0.35 million records, incurs only 10 seconds to process a request.

Rule-Based Coordination of Distributed Web Service Transactions

Current approaches to transactional support of distributed processes in service-oriented environments are limited to scenarios where the participant initiating the process maintains a controlling position throughout the lifetime of the process. This constraint impedes support of complex processes where participants may only possess limited local views on the overall process. Furthermore, there is little support of dynamic aspects: failure or exit of participants usually leads to cancelation of the whole process. In this paper, we address these limitations by introducing a framework that strengthens the role of the coordinator and allows for largely autonomous coordination of dynamic processes. We first discuss motivating examples and analyze existing approaches to transactional coordination. Subsequently, we present our framework TracG, which is based on WS-BusinessActivity. It contains at its core a set of rules for deciding on the ongoing confirmation or cancelation status of participants' work and protocol extensions for monitoring the progress of a process. Various types of participant vitality for a process are distinguished, facilitating the controlled exit of nonvital participants as well as continuation of a process in case of tolerable failures. The implementation of the framework is presented and discussed regarding interoperability issues.

Bridging Security and Fault Management within Distributed Workflow Management Systems

As opposed to centralized workflow management systems, the distributed execution of workflows can not rely on a trusted centralized point of coordination. As a result, basic security features including compliance of the overall sequence of workflow operations with the pre-defined workflow execution plan or traceability become critical issues that are yet to be addressed. Besides, the detection of security inconsistencies during the execution of a workflow usually implies the complete failure of the workflow although it may be possible in some situations to recover from the latter. In this paper, we present security solutions supporting the secure execution of distributed workflows. These mechanisms capitalize on onion encryption techniques and security policy models to assure the integrity of the distributed execution of workflows, to prevent business partners from being involved in a workflow instance forged by a malicious peer and to provide business partners identity traceability for sensitive workflow instances. Moreover, we specify how these security mechanisms can be combined with a transactional coordination framework to recover from faults that may be caught during their execution. The defined solutions can easily be integrated into distributed workflow management systems as our design is strongly coupled with the runtime specification of decentralized workflows.

Transaction policies for service-oriented computing

Service-oriented computing is emerging as a distributed computing model where autonomous services interact with each other using standard Internet technology. In addition to the application-specific functions that services provide (different) services may also support (different) sets of protocols and formats addressing extra-functional concerns such as transaction processing and reliable messaging. This raises the need for services to complement their functional service descriptions with descriptions of extra-functional capabilities, requirements, and/or preferences, which must be matched and enforced for service interactions. In this paper, we address the problem of transactional coordination in service-oriented computing. We argue for the use of declarative policy assertions to advertise and match support for different transaction styles (direct transaction processing, queued transaction processing, and compensation-based transaction processing), and introduce the concept of and system support for transaction coupling modes as the policy-based contracts guiding transactional business process execution. We focus on concrete, protocol-specific policies that apply to relevant Web services specifications. Using transaction policies and our middleware system, we are able to support a reliable SOC environment.