Supporting Reliable Transactional Business Processes by Publish/Subscribe Techniques

Abstract. Processes have increasingly become an important design prin-ciple for complex intra- and inter-organizational e-services. In particu-lar, processes allow to provide value-added services by seamlessly com-bining existing e-services into a coherent whole, even across corporate boundaries. Process management approaches support the de¯nition and the execution of prede¯ned processes as distributed applications. They ensure that execution guarantees are observed even in the presence of failures and concurrency. The implementation of a process management execution environment is a challenging task in several aspects. First, the processes to be executed are not necessarily static and follow a prede-¯ned pattern but must be generated dynamically (e.g., choosing the best o®er in a pre-sales interaction). Second, deferring the execution of some application services in case of overload or unavailability is often not ac-ceptable and must be avoided by exploiting replicated services or even by automatically adding such services, and by monitoring and balancin