A Formal Framework for Multi-Party Business Protocols

Service Oriented Architecture deployments comprise large numbers of long-running, highly dynamic complex end-to-end service interactions reflecting asynchronous message flows that typically transcend several organizations and span several geographical locations. Business protocols are formalisms to model the structure of the message-based interactions among services and can be flexible ranging from conventional inter-organizational point-to-point service interactions to fully blown dynamic multi-party interactions of global reach. In this work we introduce a formal framework based on Deterministic Finite Automata enriched with temporal constraints, to describe multi-party business protocols. We extend this framework with the notion of multi-party business protocol soundness and show how it is possible to execute a multi-party protocol consistently in a completely distributed manner while guaranteeing eventual termination.