BTx-Net: A Token Based Dynamic Model for Supporting Consistent Collaborative Business Transactions

Business transaction is about coordinating the flow of information among organizations and linking their business processes, associated with the solutions to ensure the eventual generation of the consistent outcomes. One important issue here is how to maintain consistency for each partner in the collaborative business transaction as well as consistency for the transaction as a whole during the long running business process in the presence of failures and concurrent activities. Existing models and protocols by designing static process control can not support the dynamic behavior of the collaborative business transaction in the complex loosely coupled business environment. In this paper, we present a novel transactional model, BTx-Net, which is based on Hierarchical CPN to manage consistency for business transaction. Quite different from traditional CPN, two types of tokens, Management Token and Application Token, are used in BTx-Net. The correlation of both tokens is used for verifying consistency in business transaction. We believe that BTx-Net provides a theoretical basis for describing and managing collaborative business transaction consistencies.