Policy-Driven Exception-Management for Composite Web Services

Process-based composition of Web services has recently gained significant momentum in the implementation of business processes. A critical and time-consuming part of business process development is the detection and handling of exceptions that may occur during process execution. In this paper, we introduce a novel, policy-driven approach to exception management, which substantially simplifies business process development. We advocate that exception management should be implemented in the system infrastructure. Using our exception management framework, developers define exception policies in a declarative manner. Before a business process is executed, the service composition middleware integrates the exception policies with normal business logic to generate an exception-aware process schema. We argue that our policy-driven approach significantly reduces the development time of business processes through its separation of the development of the business logic and the exception handling policies.