The Conceptualization of a Configurable Multi-party Multi-message Request-Reply Conversation

Organizations, to function effectively and expand their boundaries, require a deep insight into both process orchestration and choreography of cross-organization business processes. The set of requirements for service interactions is significant, and has not yet been sufficiently refined. Service Interaction Patterns studies by Barros et al. demonstrate this point. However, they overlook some important aspects of service interaction of bilateral and multilateral nature. Furthermore, the definition of these patterns are not precise due to the absence of a formal semantics. In this paper, we analyze and present a set of patterns formed around the subset of patterns documented by Barros et al. concerned with Request-Reply interactions, and extend these ideas to cover multiple parties and multiple messages. We concentrate on the interaction between multiple parties, and analyze issues of a non-guaranteed response and different aspects of message handling. We propose one configurable, formally defined, conceptual model to describe and analyze options and variants of request-reply patterns. Furthermore, we propose a graphical notation to depict every pattern variant, and formalize the semantics by means of Coloured Petri Nets. In addition, we apply this pattern family to evaluate WS-BPEL v2.0 and check how selected pattern variants can be operationalized in Oracle BPEL PM.