Distributed Global Transaction Support for Workflow Management Applications

Abstract

Workflow management systems require advanced transaction support to cope with their inherently long-running processes. The recent trend to distribute workflow executions requires an even more advanced transaction support system that is able to handle distribution. This paper presents a model as well as an architecture to provide distributed advanced transaction support. Characteristic of the transaction support system is the ability to deal with arbitrary distribution of business processes over multiple workflow management systems and the support for flexible rollbacks. The modularity of the architecture and the orthogonality with respect to the workflow management system allows the transaction system to be applied in other application areas as well. The high scalability of the architecture allows an arbitrary combination of transaction support systems and workflow management systems of which the locations are irrelevant. In the WIDE project, the developed technology is applied to the commercial FORO workflow management system.

Semantics and architecture of global transaction support in workflow environments

“…Even more flexibility in rollback behavior can be obtained by using dynamic savepoints, i.e., steps that are dynamically assigned the savepoint label based on expressions over the transaction state. Global transactions that are distributed over multiple transaction engines can be supported by a distributed global transaction system, as described in [Von99].…”

“…As such, the resulting system architecture can be considered a federation of workflow and transaction servers, based on middleware services that hide distribution details. Protocols and architecture for this distributed global transaction system are elaborated in [Von99].…”

A survey on the history of transaction management: from flat to grid transactions

“…4.2 [13]. The upper layer is based on an extension of Sagas that roll back the completed sub-transactions using the compensation mechanism, thus relaxing the requirement of atomicity [74]. The semantics of the upper layer have been formalized using simple set and graph theory [35].…”

Publishing and composition of atomicity-equivalent services for B2B collaboration

“…The global transaction model [13] [19] facilitates an arbitrary distribution of and flexible rollback semantics of business processes over multiple workflow management systems. It supports the complete rollback semantics of [12] and extends the latter with the notion of partial rollback.…”