Autonomous Failure-Handling Mechanism for WF Long Running Transactions

Abstract

Business Processes naturally involve long running activities and require transactional behaviour across them. The work presented in this paper is a proposal for a novel autonomous failure handling mechanism for long running nested transactions (LRT) and forms part of a general management and compensation model for long running transactions in workflows. The mechanism is based on propagation of failures through a recursive hierarchical structure of transaction components (nodes and execution paths). The management system of transactions (COMPMOD) is implemented as a reactive system controller, where system components change their states based on rules in response to triggering of events such as activation, failure, force-fail, completion, or compensation events. A notable new feature of the model is the distinction of vital and non-vital components, allowing the process designer to express the cruciality of activities in the workflow with respect to the business logic.