Transaction calculus (Invited paper)

Transaction-based services are increasingly being applied in solving many universal interoperability problems. Compensation is one typical feature for long-running transactions. This paper presents a design model for specifying the behaviour of compensable programs. The new model for handling exception and compensation is built as conservative extension of the standard relational model. The paper puts forward a mathematical framework for transactions where a transaction is treated as a mapping from its environment to compensable programs. We propose a transaction refinement calculus, and show that every transaction can be converted to a primitive one which simply consists of a forward activity and a compensation module.