In Service-Oriented Architectures, everything is a service and services can interact with each other when needed. Web services (or simply services) are loosely coupled software components that are published, discovered, and invoked across the Web. As the use of Web services grows, in order to correctly interact with the growing services, it is important to understand the business protocols that provide clients with the information on how to interact with services. In dynamic Web services environments, service providers need to constantly adapt their business protocols for reflecting the restrictions and requirements proposed by new applications, new business strategies, and new laws, or for fixing the problems found in the protocol definition. However, the effective management of such a protocol evolution raises critical problems: one of the most critical issues is to handle instances running under the old protocol when their protocol has been changed. Simple solutions, such as aborting them or allowing them to continue to run according to the old protocol, can be considered, but they are inapplicable for many reasons (e.g., the lose of work already done and the critical nature of work). We present a framework that supports service administrators in managing the business protocol evolution by providing several features, such as a set of change operators allowing modifications of protocols, a variety of protocol change impact analyses automatically determining which ongoing instances can be migrated to the new version of protocol, and data mining techniques inducing a model for classifying ongoing instances migrateable to the new protocol. To support the protocol evolution process, we have also developed database-backed GUI tools on top of our existing system. The proposed approach and tools can help service administrators in managing the evolution of ongoing instances when the business protocols of services with which they are interacting have changed.
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