Supporting Business Transactions Via Partial Backward Recovery In Workflow Management Systems

Workflow management systems are used today to realize advanced, distributed application systems, e.g. to support and control real world business processes like office procedures. With the increase of sophistication of these application systems a flexible transaction concept is required to be added to the workflow management system. Business processes exploiting such advanced transaction features are often referred to as “business transactions„. We propose to support business transactions by compensation based partial backward recovery of the control flow within an instance of a business process. Work units of a business process which are defined to be potentially subject to such kind of recovery are introduced as “spheres of joint compensation„ For the workflow management system IBM FlowMark we show in detail how its metcunodel can be extended to support spheres of joint compensation.