Dynamic execution planning for reliable collaborative business processes

Collaborative business processes, implemented and carried out via web services and enabling dynamic interaction among organizations, are becoming more indispensable to competitiveness in the global market. As dynamic collaboration prevails, the quality of service (QoS) of collaborative processes becomes more important. A critical requirement in cases where processes involve long-term activities is to guarantee successful completion within time constraints. In this study, we developed a methodology for dynamic planning of web service execution that imparts reliability to collaborative business processes. In order to ensure that processes successfully execute within time constraints and at minimum cost, the proposed method dynamically modifies execution plans at run-time by means of fault-tolerance techniques. Since generation of an execution plan of minimum cost while guaranteeing successful completion is classified as an NP-hard problem, a heuristic algorithm was developed. Additionally, to compare the proposed algorithm's performance with those of the branch-and-bound method and the genetic algorithm (GA), a set of experiments was conducted. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.