FACTS: A Framework for Fault-Tolerant Composition of Transactional Web Services

  • Authors:

  • An Liu;Qing Li;Liusheng Huang;Mingjun Xiao

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei and University of Science and Technology, Suzhou;City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong and USTC-CityU Joint Advanced Research Center, Suzhou;University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei and University of Science and Technology, Suzhou;University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei and University of Science and Technology, Suzhou

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Services Computing
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Along with the standardization of Web services composition language and the widespread acceptance of composition technologies, Web services composition is becoming an efficient and cost-effective way to develop modern business applications. As Web services are inherently unreliable, how to deliver reliable Web services composition over unreliable Web services is a significant and challenging problem. In this paper, we propose FACTS, a framework for fault-tolerant composition of transactional Web services. We identify a set of high-level exception handling strategies and a new taxonomy of transactional Web services to devise a fault-tolerant mechanism that combines exception handling and transaction techniques. We also devise a specification module and a verification module to assist service designers to construct fault-handling logic conveniently and correctly. Furthermore, we design an implementation module to automatically implement fault-handling logic in WS-BPEL. A case study demonstrates the viability of our framework and experimental results show that FACTS can improve fault tolerance of composite services with acceptable overheads.