Managing the Variability in the Transactional Services Selection

Web service composition is the capability to recursively construct a value added service by means of picking up existing services. An important step in the composition process is the selection step, which includes choosing services located in repositories. The selection approaches of Web services need to consider their specifics which raises important challenges as the management of the inherent service variability in functionality and implementation and ensuring correct execution termination between others. To realize reliable service compositions, transactional properties of services must be considered during the selection step. We argue that the transactional properties should be considered at the operation level of each service to be composed. However, modelling transactional services composition at the operation level drastically increment the complexity of service selection. In order to overcome this difficulty, in this paper we report on our research in progress on transactional service selection, which follows a Software Product Line approach considering the set of services that provide the same functionality as part of a service family. We model the variable operations of the service families using Feature Models. In this way, the selection process consists of selecting each service from a service family such that the aggregated transactional property satisfies the user preference.