Providing Decision Capabilities to Coordinators in Distributed Processes

Current approaches to transactional support of distributed processes in service-oriented environments are limited to scenarios where the participant initiating the process maintains a controlling position throughout the lifetime of the process. This constraint impedes support of complex processes where participants may only possess limited local views on the overall process. In this paper, we present a framework to extend WS-BusinessActivity that strengthens the role of the coordinator. We develop a set of rules for deciding on the confirmation or cancellation of participants' work and introduce protocol extensions for monitoring the progress of a process, allowing coordinators to initiate the completion of processes largely autonomously. We discuss motivating examples as well as existing approaches and evaluate our rule set against various service interaction patterns.