A Calculus for Long-Running Transactions

We study long-running transactions in open component-based distributed applications, such as Web Services platforms. Long-running transactions describe time-extensive activities that involve several distributed components. Henceforth, in case of failure, it is usually not possible to restore the initial state, and firing a compensation process is preferable. Despite the interest of such transactional mechanisms, a formal modeling of them is still lacking. In this paper we address this issue by designing an extension of the asynchronous π-calculus with long-running transactions (and sequences) – the πt -calculus. We study the practice of πt-calculus, by discussing few paradigmatic examples, and its theory, by defining a semantics and providing a correct encoding of πt-calculus into asynchronous π-calculus.