A rule-based exception handling approach in SOA

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a business-centric IT architectural approach that promoted integrated and reusable business processes or services. Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) provides an ideal way to composite services within SOA into complete business processes. However, the distributed, heterogeneous and highly volatile nature of web service will cause many exceptions during execution of the complete business processes. Although BPEL provides some items for exception handling, the use of these items bring in additional work for the business process designer and increase the coupling between BPEL and error handling. In this paper, we present a rule-based approach for exception handling in a unified way. The approach takes the reliability and the extensibility of web services into consideration. Such approach improves the performance of the rule-based system when handling exceptions. We also propose a rule-based exception handling framework (REHF) to implement this approach. And the future research directions are pointed out at last.