Transaction Support Research Articles

Constraints-Aware Scheduling for Transactional Services Composition

Composite Web services need transactional support to guarantee their consistent and reliable execution. Due to the long running and inter-organizational characteristics of Web services, current approaches for transactional Web services composition adopt compensation mechanism to maintain atomicity. A common assumption is that a compensation operation can be applied at any time with no cost. However, compensation operations are typically associated with temporal and cost constraints, which make compensation mechanism problematic in this new environment. To address this problem, we distinguish two types of scheduling for transactional Web services composition: time aware scheduling and cost aware scheduling. We devise several algorithms for scheduling, which can ensure the atomicity of composite services when compensation operations have temporal constraints, and assist composite services to maintain atomicity with minimum compensation cost when compensation operations have cost constraints. We benchmark our algorithms by simulations and the results show that our algorithm decreases the compensation cost and in turn improves the QoS of transactional services composition.

A two-step approach to building bilateral consensus between agents based on relationship learning theory

Researchers are increasingly focusing on the agent based approach to transaction support in ubiquitous commerce. These agents work autonomously to maximize utility on the user’s behalf. In the case of a cooperative game, rather than a win–lose zero-sum game, agents may negotiate with each other or have a negotiating agent provide a suggestion that can be reasonably accepted by the dyad to build a consensus. In this paper we propose a novel methodology that increases agent performance in terms of costs associated with building consensus and successful negotiation rates. To do so, we develop a two-step approach: joint learning and negotiation to consensus building. We also conduct an experimental study to show the feasibility of the methodology.

Exploring Delay-Aware Transactions in Heterogeneous Mobile Environments

In the expanding e-society, mobile embedded systems are increasingly used to support transactions such as for banking or database applications. Such systems entail a range of heterogeneous entities - both the devices and the networks connecting them. While these systems are exposed to frequent and varied perturbations, the support of atomic distributed transactions is still a fundamental requirement to achieve consistent decisions. Guaranteeing atomicity and high performance in traditional fixed wired networks is based on the assumption that node and link failures occur rarely. This assumption is often not supported in current and upcoming mobile environments where the heterogeneity and mobility often result in link and node failures as a dominant operational scenario. In order to continue guaranteeing strict atomicity while providing for high efficiency (low resource blocking time of transaction participants and message overhead) and acceptable commit rate, transactional fault-tolerance techniques need to be revisited perhaps at the cost of transaction execution time. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive classification of perturbations for a wide range of mobile environments including infrastructure-based, ad-hoc, and hybrid environments. We also investigate the impact of these perturbations on the design of mobile transactions. In particular we argue for the delay-awareness of mobile transactions to allow for the fault-tolerance mechanisms to ensure resilience to the various and frequent perturbations.

A middleware framework for managing transactions in group-oriented mobile commerce services

The emerging group-oriented mobile commerce services are receiving significant interest among researchers, developers, wireless service providers, and users. Some of these services, including mobile auctions, mobile financial services, and multi-party interactive games, are transaction-oriented and will require the network and protocol support for managing transactions. In this paper, we focus on technical challenges of managing transactions in group-oriented mobile commerce services by presenting a framework, which includes requirements, membership-management and support for dependable transactions. More specifically, we present several group-oriented mobile services, characterize transaction requirements of group-oriented m-commerce services, present protocols for membership management to support both distributed and centralized processing, and present multi-network access and agent-based system for dependable transactions.

A total benefits strategy is a valuable approach in HR outsourcing

© 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ert.20176 It’s a given that employees value their benefit packages as key components of their work/life experience, but for both employees and employers, there’s more to the picture than merely acknowledging the importance of benefits. Increasingly, employers need to know how the members of their workforce view their benefit offerings—indeed, the perceived value of various benefits may change over time—and how the management and administration of those benefits may affect employee satisfaction and engagement in a positive or negative manner. Clearly, a successful benefits strategy can play a major role in recruiting and retention efforts, as well as improving employee attitudes (and well-being) and driving strong business results. The role of employee benefits has evolved significantly from the time when new hires were simply told of their health insurance, pension, and other benefit options almost as an afterthought to employment. As healthcare costs have soared and cost sharing has become the norm, and as defined-benefit (DB) plans have been replaced by definedcontribution (DC) plans, the employee-benefit landscape has become a more complex terrain. For both employer and employee, managing benefits is a challenge that requires a strategic approach and access to specialized resources. Not surprisingly, an outsourced solution for benefits administration has become a strong option for organizations. An approach that meets this challenge is total benefits outsourcing (TBO). A TBO solution answers employers’ need for expert, fully capable, and technologically robust administration of benefits while addressing employees’ need for comprehensive educational programs, decisionmaking tools, and self-service resources. The benefits of TBO—which is best defined as an integrated approach, typically consolidating DB, DC, and health and wellness administration services with a single outsourcing provider—are becoming more evident to employers. In fact, TBO is one of the fastest-growing segments in the HR outsourcing market, and industry analysts forecast significant growth over the next few years. It’s a trend driven by the increasing complexity and cost of managing and delivering benefits, and it is further propelled by a desire to provide a better and more comprehensive benefits experience for employees as a means of attracting and retaining a trained and qualified workforce in an increasingly competitive market. On the most basic level, a TBO strategy creates economies of scale by bundling multiple benefits services with one vendor. Employers can outsource administrative, transactional, and employee support functions traditionally done in-house, allowing HR personnel to be redeployed to address more strategic issues. From the employee

Computerisation of general practice in the Republic of Croatia: experience gained in general practice use

Well-organised medical records are the prerequisite for achieving a high level of performance in primary healthcare settings. Recording balanced structured and coded data as well as free text can improve both quality and organisation of work in the office. It provides a more substantiated support of financial transactions and accountancy, allows better communication with other facilities and institutions, and is a source of valuable scientific research material. This article is the result of an individual experience gained in general practice use of various programs/systems employed within the family medicine frame, and the frame of evaluation of available and commonly-exploited program solutions. The use of various programs allows for systematic adjustments as to the increasingly complex requirements imposed on electronic medical records (EMRs). The experience of a general practitioner, presented in this paper, confirms the assumption that an adequate program to be employed with EMRs should be developed, provided that family medicine practitioners, that is, the final users, have been involved in each and every stage of its development, adjustment, implementation and evaluation.

Governance structures of the electricity distribution network operation activities

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to shed light on the governance choices of firms operating in the electricity distribution network operation activities. The study aims to consider both costs and benefits of different governance choices and to examine which of the activities could be outsourced and which it is preferable to keep in‐house. The study makes a distinction between the electricity retail services and electricity distribution network activities and focuses solely on the network business.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on a four‐staged process and utilizes the extended transaction cost economics as a theoretical framework. The research design includes in‐depth interviews with ten managers and CEOs of Finnish electrical utilities, analysis and interpretation of findings and verification of results by electricity network business experts.FindingsThe extended transactional cost economics theoretical framework and research design support analysis of governance structures and make‐or‐buy decisions. The findings demonstrate that the activities of the companies operating in the electricity distribution business differ in terms of potential long‐term efficiency effects when sourced from the market or made in‐house. The determinants of the governance choice depend partly on the nature and strategic importance of the activity in question. Operations management seems to be a function to be kept in‐house in the current market situation, whereas there are clear potential benefits that can be obtained by outsourcing field work activities. The results related to the governance of control room activities are more complicated.Originality/valueThis study brings not only the transaction costs but also the benefit‐side and the dynamic aspects of boundary choices under assessment.

E-commerce partnering due diligence: A methodology for trust in e-commerce in food networks

Abstract Trust is one of the key facilitators for transactions in food networks. Recent developments in electronic transaction support such as e-commerce allow for efficiency improvements in exchange processes along food supply chains. However, the communication of trust between transaction partners is not sufficiently realized in existing e-commerce offers for food networks. To enable food networks to exploit efficiency potentials from electronic commerce, appropriate generation of trust and confidence at the transaction partners in the sense of an e-commerce partnering due diligence is necessary. This paper presents a methodology for a systematic identification of trust generation for electronic transactions in food networks. The methodology builds on three central elements: transaction decisions, the four phases of the transaction process, and the information and communication processes as mediating links. The transaction decision portfolio builds the central element of the methodology and contains cri...

Web services technology in support of business transactions

Advanced business applications typically involve well-defined business functions such as payment processing, shipping and tracking, determining new product offerings, granting/extending credit, managing market risk and so on. These reflect commonly standard business functions that apply to a variety of application scenarios. Although such business functions drive trans- actional applications between trading partners they are completely external to current Web services transaction mechanisms and are only expressed as part of applica- tion logic. To remedy this situation, this paper proposes a business-aware Web services transaction model and support mechanisms, which is driven by common busi- ness functions. The model allows expressing business functions such as payment and credit conditions, deliv- ery conditions, business agreements stipulated in SLAs, liabilitiesanddisputeresolutionpolicies.Itallowsblend- ing these business functions with QoS criteria such as security support to guarantee integrity of information, confidentiality, and non-repudiation.

Simulation-based evaluation of transactions support for group-oriented mobile commerce

Broadband wireless services, including group-oriented mobile commerce services, are receiving a significant interest among researchers, developers, wireless service providers and users. In this paper, we focus on evaluating the network support for group-oriented transactions using simulation modelling techniques. Our results show that the transaction delays are governed by user connectivity/dis-connectivity ratio and average disconnection duration, while the transaction blocking is governed primarily by the average duration of disconnection. It is also shown that for multi-parametric cases, increased application flexibility can compensate for the negative impact of increased or more frequent user disconnections.

A transactional grid workflow service for ShanghaiGrid

As grid technology is expanding from scientific computing to business applications, transactional workflow management emerges as one of the most important core services for grids. The ShanghaiGrid launched by the Shanghai municipality is a city grid that aggregates most of the heterogeneous supercomputers, traffic data and others distributed in multiple organisations in Shanghai. In this paper, we propose a transactional grid workflow service (GridTW) for the ShanghaiGrid to guarantee the reliability and automatisation of e-business applications. The paper focuses on how to provide a transaction support based on grid characteristics and combine the transaction service with workflow management. We present a coordination algorithm for the management of transactional grid workflows, and validate correctness of the algorithm through Petri nets. The paper also presents how to discover grid services on which application operations are executed and to improve the flexibility of workflow control.

Executing Java programs with transactional memory

Parallel programming is difficult due to the complexity of dealing with conventional lock-based synchronization. To simplify parallel programming, there have been a number of proposals to support transactions directly in hardware and eliminate locks completely. Although hardware support for transactions has the potential to completely change the way parallel programs are written, initially transactions will be used to execute existing parallel programs. In this paper we investigate the implications of using transactions to execute existing parallel Java programs. Our results show that transactions can be used to support all aspects of Java multithreaded programs, and once Java virtual machine issues have been addressed, the conversion of a lock-based application into transactions is largely straightforward. The performance that these converted applications achieve is equal to or sometimes better than the original lock-based implementation.

On the Impact of Formal Methods in the SOA

We present an overview of recent research that provide a formal analysis of coordination and composition in Service Oriented Architectures. In particular we focus on transactional support in the Web Service Architecture. The classic notion of transaction in database systems evolved into weaker forms, in order to adapt to multi-domain, loosely coupled environments including the execution of long running activities. Despite the shared interest in these weaker transactions, supported by most languages for Web service coordination and composition, in many cases there is not an agreement on their semantics. Transactions are considered under two complementary perspectives. The former is the local perspective of the business process: transactions are a control construct providing a user-defined error handling mechanism. The latter, is the perspective addressing the synchronization among distributed services: distributed transaction protocols. Distributed transaction protocols are evolving according to the requirements of the real e-business scenario over the Web. One particular direction of this evolution, that we discuss, is the negotiation of service capabilities to enable automated selection.

Supporting dependable group‐oriented mobile transactions: redundancy‐based architecture and performance

AbstractSeveral of the emerging mobile commerce services, such as mobile auctions, mobile financial services, and multi‐party interactive games, will require support for dependable transactions. This is a difficult challenge because of both intermittent connectivity and potential failures in wireless infrastructure. In this paper, we present a multi‐network access‐based wireless architecture and related protocols to support dependable transactions. The key idea is to allow group users to utilize access to one or more wireless networks to complete different steps of a transaction. This allows for transactions to be completed even under time‐ and location‐dependent connectivity problems and network failures. The performance results show that access to multiple wireless networks leads to very high transaction completion probability even when individual wireless networks do not offer continuous and/or highly available access. The transaction completion probability is found to be dependent on the group size and number of steps in a transaction, and the same level of dependable performance for transactions can be achieved by increasing the number of wireless networks or improved access to individual networks. The overhead for multi‐network access can be further reduced by creating preferred wireless networks and by reducing the number of critical users in different transaction stages. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Location-Aware Query Resolution for Location-Based Mobile Commerce

Location-based mobile commerce incorporates location-aware technologies, wire-free connectivity, and locationalized Web-based services to support the processing of location-referent transactions. In order to provide usable transaction processing services to mobile consumers, location-referent transactions require timely resolution of queries bearing transaction-related locational criteria. This research evaluates Wyse’s location-aware method of resolving these queries. Results obtained in simulated mobile commerce circumstances (1) reveal the query resolution behavior of the location-aware method, (2) confirm the method’s potential to improve the timeliness of transactional support provided to mobile consumers, and (3) identify the method-related adjustments required to maintain optimal levels of query resolution performance. The article also proposes and provides a preliminary evaluation of a heuristic that may be used in efficiently determining the method-related adjustments needed in order to maximize query resolution performance.

ASPs: The Integration Challenge

Organizations using ASPs and third-party vendors that provide value-added products to ASPs need to integrate with them. ASPs enable this integration by providing Web service-based APIs. There are significant differences between integrating with ASPs over the Internet and integrating with a local application. When integrating with ASPs, users have to consider a number of issues, including latency, unavailability, upgrades, performance, load limiting, and lack of transaction support.

Schools Conference Puts Clinicians in The Winners Circle

Schools Conference Puts Clinicians in The Winners Circle

Pessimistic Predicate/Transform Model for Long Running Business Processes

Many business processes in enterprise applications are both long running and transactional in nature. However, no current transaction model can provide full transaction support for such long running business processes. This paper proposes a new transaction model, the pessimistic predicate/transform (PP/T) model, which can provide full transaction support for long running business processes. A framework was proposed on the enterprise JavaBeans platform to implement the PP/T model. The framework enables application developers to focus on the business logic, with the underlying platform providing the required transactional semantics. The development and maintenance effort are therefore greatly reduced. Simulations show that the model has a sound concurrency management ability for long running business processes.

Virtualizing Transactional Memory

Writing concurrent programs is difficult because of the complexity of ensuring proper synchronization. Conventional lock-based synchronization suffers from wellknown limitations, so researchers have considered non-blocking transactions as an alternative. Recent hardware proposals have demonstrated how transactions can achieve high performance while not suffering limitations of lock-based mechanisms. However, current hardware proposals require programmers to be aware of platform-specific resource limitations such as buffer sizes, scheduling quanta, as well as events such as page faults, and process migrations. If the transactional model is to gain wide acceptance, hardware support for transactions must be virtualized to hide these limitations in much the same way that virtual memory shields the programmer from platform-specific limitations of physical memory. This paper proposes Virtual Transactional Memory (VTM), a user-transparent system that shields the programmer from various platform-specific resource limitations. VTM maintains the performance advantage of hardware transactions, incurs low overhead in time, and has modest costs in hardware support. While manysystem-level challenges remain, VTM takes a step toward making transactional models more widely acceptable.

Collaborative business process technologies

Tremendous developments in data storing, processing and communication over the last two decades have made unprecedented impact on how most enterprises operate, develop future business strategies and deal with day to day operations. Businesses are increasingly moving towards extensive automation of their private and public processes. This automation takes the form of complex interactions between heterogeneous and autonomous systems within the enterprise and often cross multiple organizations. Controlling these complex interactions in order to effectively manage collaborative business processes is known to be a critical yet difficult problem using current technology solutions. Consequently, the areas of research are multi-faceted ranging from security, reliability and transactional support, quality of service guarantees, process validation and optimisation, to data modelling, repository management, and semantic integrity of terminology used. Workflow Management Systems delivered effectively in the area of process enforcement, offering a clear separation of business process logic from component applications involved in process execution, thereby responding to the well-established need for application integration. The complementary role of workflow systems in supporting advanced database functions, offered a powerful environment for information systems architects. It is an observed phenomenon that a new IT solution often triggers additional, and even more advanced user requirements, which probably would not be discovered if the current systems functionality would not be so widely available. This pattern can be clearly observed in the context of workflow technology evolution. It is time now for an even more advanced and rich level of integration facilities. It should be possible to form new business processes out of pre-existing fully operational workflows at different sites for various business partners with process owner controlled levels of data disclosure, and