The Suspended Transition Paradigm within Complex Distributed Systems

Abstract

Development of distributed transaction promsing systems has emphasized issues of transaction consistency, synchronization, rollback and recovery. Comparatively little focus has been placed on humdtransaction interactions. In this paper, we introduce a new transaction paradigm, the Suspended Transaction Paradigm, that gracefully supports participation of humans in complex distributed systems, and presents a new way of viewing the role of the human in a complex distributed system. We also discuss how the suspended transaction paradigm could be used as a technique for gradually replacing the human expert with an embedded or external expert system within transaction processing systems. We conclude with several examples of the use of the suspended transaction paradigm in the context of automated Telecommunications Provisioning Systems.