Middleware to support accountability of business to business interactions

Abstract

Enabling technologies have driven standardisation efforts specifying B2B interactions between organisations including the information to be exchanged and its associated business level requirements. These interactions are encoded as conversations to which organisations agree and execute. It is pivotal to continued cooperation with these interactions that their regulation be supported; minimally, that all actions taken are held accountable and no participant is placed at a disadvantage having remained compliant. Technical protocols exist to support regulation (e.g., provide fairness and accountability). However, such protocols incur expertise, infrastructure and integration requirements, possibly diverting an organisation’s attention from fulfilling obligations to interactions in which they are involved. Guarantees provided by these protocols can be paired with functional properties, declaratively describing the support they provide. By encapsulating properties and protocols in intermediaries through which messages are routed, expertise, infrastructure and integration requirements can be alleviated from interacting organisations while their interactions are transparently provided with additional support. Previous work focused on supporting individual issues without tackling concerns of asynchronicity, transparency and loose coupling. This thesis develops on previous work by designing generalised intermediary middleware capable of intercepting messages and transparently satisfying supportive properties. By enforcing loose coupling and transparency, all interactions may be provided with additional support without modification, independent of the higher level (i.e., B2B) standards in use and existing work may be expressed as instances of the proposed generalised design. This support will be provided at lower levels, justified by a survey of B2B and messaging standards. Proof of concept implementations will demonstrate the suitability of the approach. The work will demonstrate that providing transparent, decoupled support at lower levels of abstraction is useful and can be applied to domains beyond B2B and message oriented interactions.