TREX, workflow TRansaction by means of EXceptions

Abstract

Workflow Management Systems are becoming more and more important to organizations for the execution of business processes. However, most current systems lack a consistent way of dealing with failures and exceptions. This paper proposes to use an exception-handling mechanism to provide ‘transactional’ features for workflow management systems. The modeler specifies exception handlers for activities to deal with exceptions. These exception handlers change the workflow that is being executed to deal with exceptions as they arise. Based on this idea we discuss which exceptions and exception handlers should be supported and how they interact to provide transactional capabilities.