A Three-Layer Model for Workflow Semantic Recovery in an Object-Oriented Environment

There have been numerous attempts to provide semantic recovery workflow support in order to maintain atomicity and consistency. However, they concentrate on compensation activities for individual tasks. This paper propose a three-layer model to provide comprehensive recovery support in an advanced object-oriented workflow environment, which take cares many other properties and aspects of a workflow management system (WFMS). At the workflow layer, the workflow composition hierarchy, workflow semantics and workflow commitment determines recovery requirement and data objects affected. At the data object layer, object class properties, data dependencies determines data recovery requirement. At the recovery primitive layer, users can define different types of reusable primitives to address the above recovery requirements. Based on this model with respect to ADOME-WFMS, this paper illustrates how the problem of workflow recovery can be adequately addressed, especially from an exception-handling viewpoint. In particular, a novel webbased support for cooperative workflow semantic recovery is highlighted.

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