On the interplay between fault handling and request-response service invocations

Service oriented computing (SOC) allows for the composition of services which communicate using uni-directional notification or bidirectional request-response primitives. Most service orchestration languages proposed so far provide also primitives to handle faults and compensations. The interplay between fault handling and request-response invocations is nontrivial since, for instance, faults should be notified to the request-response communication partners in order to compensate also the remote activities. Our work is motivated by the difficulties encountered in programming, using current orchestration languages, some fault handling strategies. We propose as a solution an orchestration programming style in which fault and compensation handlers are dynamically installed. We show the adequacy of our proposal defining its semantics, and proving that it satisfies some expected high-level properties. Finally, we also show how to apply dynamic handler installation in a nontrivial automotive scenario.