Negotiation Transactions: An Approach to Increase the Automation of Workflows

This paper investigates how the automation level of transactional workflow can be increased. The proposed model enables to automate the business processes where dealing is made by first requesting the offers and then making the deal based on the offers. In order to automate the negotiation of many concurrent participants located at different autonomous sites, the negotiation transaction model is introduced. The main idea behind the negotiation transaction model is to carry out the negotiation by a protocol, called the 2PN-protocol, which has the same kind of execution structure as the 2PC-protocol has, but those differ in that the messages of the 2PN-protocol have workflow specific semantics. Further, in order to avoid the problems caused by the long duration of negotiation transactions, we have designed a new local transaction model, called the 2P-transactions, which are also useful independently of the negotiation transactions.

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