Customized atomicity specification for transactional workflows

Abstract

We introduce a new approach for specifying transaction management requirements for workflow applications. We propose independent models for the specification of workflow and transaction properties. Although we distinguish multiple transaction properties in our approach, we focus on atomicity. We propose an intuitive notation to specify atomicity and provide generic rules to integrate the workflow specification and the atomicity specification into one single model based on Petri nets. The integrated model can be checked for correctness. We call this correctness criterion relaxed soundness as a weaker notion of the existing soundness criterion. We can relax the correctness criterion because we rely on run-time transaction management. A real life example shows the applicability of the concepts.