An Approach to Handling Failure Recovery in Service Composition and Its Analysis

Service composition is an effective way to build complex Web service applications. However, it is a challenge to handle failure recovery due to the uncertainty of service in distributed and heterogeneous environment. This paper proposes an approach to handling failure recovery in service composition. Petri nets are used to model the different components of service composition, failure recovery rules and service selection strategies are given. Based on these, aspect-orientation is used to weave failure recovery concern into service composition, which includes failure warning concern, service selection concern and recovery concern, the weaving mechanism dynamically integrates these schemas into a failure recovery model. The operation semantics and related theories of Petri nets help prove its effectiveness and correctness. A case study and experimental results demonstrate the approach can simplify the failure recovery process, and improve the design quality of service composition.