Composing Web-service-like Abstract State Machines (ASMs)

We ease the design of collaborative business processes respecting desired business goals by the composition algorithm presented in this paper. The composition of multiple parties' business processes is always done with a specific objective in mind. Not only in the positive case, but also if the objective of a business process can not be fulfilled, all participating business processes need to be in some expected recovery state. We propose a composition algorithm solving the task of designing a collaborative business process while respecting a set of primary and recovery goals. In our model, each business process is described as a finite state machine. The multiplication of all business processes in one single model of possible executions would lead to an explosion of the number of states. Therefore, our composition algorithm directly interprets the multiple finite state machine (FSM) representations and creates a collaborative business process without integrating all FSMs into a single FSM upfront. Our composition algorithm returns an orchestration of the given business processes only in the case that it can be assured that each execution only leads to an expected primary or recovery goal. In order to prove our concepts, we first mathematically define the execution of business processes and orchestrations by providing abstract state machine (ASM) representations for them. Second, we execute the ASMs in the execution engine CoreASM which shows that the generated orchestration steers the execution of the business processes as intended.