State propagation-based monitoring of business transactions

Abstract

Business analysts want to monitor the status of their business goals in a business-centric manner, without any knowledge of the actual implementation artifacts that contribute to achieve these goals. Business transactions are one means to represent business goals and requirements. A business transaction is typically implemented by a choreography of different parties contributing to the accomplishment of a common agreement. To meet the constantly changing requirements for all parties in a business transaction choreographies often have to be adapted (e.g. based on the capabilities of different execution environments). The resulting challenge is that the execution state of a choreography executed on several locations has to be propagated to the business analyst to enable monitoring of the (adapted) business transaction. For this purpose we introduce a meta-model and state model of business transactions. Based on these models, we introduce a two-stage monitoring approach involving state propagation of the execution status of the adapted choreography to the original choreography and from there to the business transaction.