TiCoBTx-Net: A Model to Manage Temporal Consistency of Service-Oriented Business Collaboration

Business collaboration is about coordinating the flow of information among organizations and linking their business processes into a cohesive whole. Collaborative business processes are time critical within and across organizations and can become unreliable due to temporal inconsistency where processes cannot execute according to the agreed temporal policies. It is necessary to have a mechanism to manage temporal consistency in service-oriented business collaboration. In this paper, we propose a model named Timed Choreographical Business Transaction Net (TiCoBTx-Net) based on Hierarchical Colored Petri Net for individual business participants to specify and manage the temporal consistency in business collaboration. A series of temporal polices are formalized and checked in TiCoBTx-Net to enforce the temporal consistency at design time and runtime. A verification mechanism is also developed to clarify the status of temporal inconsistencies. Finally, the implementation details of the proposed mechanism is provided.