The development and evaluation of exception handling mechanisms for order fulfillment process based on BPEL4WS

The advance of Internet technology fosters the order fulfillment process in a supply chain across heterogeneous information systems. In order to monitor states between partners in the process, this study develops exception handling mechanisms based on Web service stack. After detecting exceptions, the first step is to make use of the fault and compensation handlers provided by the BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) specification to roll back planned or even executed business processes belonging to the same scope to the original state. The second step is to utilize the resource searching mechanisms, including BE4WS (Business Explore for Web Services) and BCME (Business Criteria Matchmaking Engine), to find suitable substitutes to make a replacement or find fitting partners to cooperate with the original one. The third step is to take advantage of the extensibility, flexibility and scalability of BPEL4WS business process to adjust and re-form a new one to handle unexpected situations. This study uses the LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) supply chain as an example to evaluate the proposed exception handling mechanisms. The results show that the proposed methods obtain encouraging performance. The major contribution of this research is the initiative efforts on developing exception handling mechanisms based on Web service technologies to improve the exception handling performance.