Switching Parties in a Collaboration at Run-Time

During the execution of a service collaboration, a party may drop out for technical reasons or business reasons. In that case, that party must be replaced in the collaboration, at run-time, by a new party. Ideally, the new party can pick up where the old party left. Currently, algorithms exist that can help with the selection and adaptation of the new party to incorporate it in the collaboration. Also, algorithms exist that can help to pick up a business process where it left off. However, to the best of our knowledge, no algorithms exist that can help a new party in a collaboration to pick up where the old party left off. This paper fills that gap, by providing an overview of the components and operations that are necessary to enable a party in a collaboration to be replaced by another party at run-time. In addition the paper presents two strategies, and the corresponding algorithms, that realize the architecture. As a proof-of-concept, a tool was developed that implements both strategies.