Abstract
Process Support Systems (PSSs) are software systems supporting the modeling, enactment, monitoring, and analysis of business processes. Process automation technology can be fully exploited when predictable and repetitive processes are executed. Unfortunately, many processes are faced with the need of managing exceptional situations that may occur during their execution, and possibly even more exceptions and failures can occur when the process execution is supported by a PSS. Exceptional situations may be caused by system (hardware or software) failures, or may by related to the semantics of the business process.
In this paper we introduce a taxonomy of failures and exceptions and discuss the effect that they can have on a PSS and on its ability to support business processes. Then, we present the main approaches that commercial PSSs and research prototypes offer in order to capture and react to exceptional situations, and we show which classes of failure or exception can be managed by each approach.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
D. Georgakopoulos, H. Hornick, and A. Sheth, ‘An overview of workflow management: from process modeling to workflow automation infrastructure,’ Distributed and Parallel Databases, vol. 3, 1995.
H. Stark and L. Lachal, Ovum Evaluates: Workflow. Ovum ltd., September 1995.
A. Finkelstein, J. Kramer, and B. Nuseibeh, eds., Software Process Modelling and Technology. Research Studies Press Limited (J. Wiley), 1994.
A. Fuggetta and C. Ghezzi, ‘State of the art and open issues in process-centered software engineering environments,’ Journal of Systems & Software, vol. 26, July 1994.
V. Ambriola, R. Conradi, and A. Fuggetta, ‘Assessing process-centered environments,’ ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, vol. 6, July 1997.
G. Cugola, ‘Tolerating deviations in process support systems via flexible enactment of process models,’ IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 24, November 1998.
J. Eder and W. Liebhart, ‘Contributions to exception handling in workflow management,’ in Proceedings of the EDBT Workshop on Workflow Management Systems, (Valencia, Spain), Mar. dy1998.
P. Grefen, B. Pernici, and G. Sanchez, Database Support for Workflow Management: the WIDE Project. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999.
J. Rumbaugh, I. Jacobson, and G. Booch, The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual. Addison Wesley, 1999.
G. Cugola, E. Di Nitto, A. Fuggetta, and C. Ghezzi, ‘A framework for formalizing inconsistencies in human-centered systems,’ ACM Transactions On Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), vol. 5, July 1996.
S. Bandinelli, A. Fuggetta, C. Ghezzi, and L. Lavazza, ‘SPADE: an environment for Software Process Analysis, Design, and Enactment,’ in Software Process Modelling and Technology (A. Finkelstein, J. Kramer, and B. Nuseibeh, eds.), Research Studies Press Limited (J. Wiley), 1994.
S. Bandinelli, A. Fuggetta, C. Ghezzi, and S. Grigolli, ‘Process Enactment in SPADE,’ in Proceedings of the Second European Workshop on Software Process Technology, (Trondheim (Norway)), Springer-Verlag, September 1992.
S. Bandinelli, M. Braga, A. Fuggetta, and L. Lavazza, ‘The architecture of the SPADE-1 process-centered SEE,’ in Proceedings of the 3rd European Workshop on Software Process Technology, LNCS 772, (Villard de Lans (Grenoble), France), February 1994.
S. Dami, J. Estublier, and M. Amiour, ‘Apel: a graphical yet executable formalism for process modeling,’ in Process Technology (E. Di Nitto and A. Fuggetta, eds.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, January 1998.
J. Estublier, P. Y. Cunin, and N. Belkhatir, ‘Architectures for process support system interoperability,’ in 5th International COnference on Software Process, (Chicago, Illinois, USA), pp. 137–147, June 1998.
F. Casati, S. Ceri, B. Pernici, and G. Pozzi, ‘Workflow Evolution,’ Data and Knowledge Engineering, vol. 24, pp. 211–238, Jan. 1998.
F. Casati, Models, Semantics, and Formal Methods for the Design of Workflows and Their Exceptions. PhD thesis, Politecnico di Milano-Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Milano, Italy, Dec. 1998.
S. Ellis, K. Keddara, and G. Rozenberg, ‘Dynamic change within workflow systems,’ in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Organizational Computing Systems (COOCS ’95), (Milpitas, California), 1995.
C. Liu, M. Orlowska, and H. Li, ‘Automating handover in dynamic workflow environments,’ in Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering CAiSE’98, (Pisa, Italy), June 1998.
M. Reichert and P. Dadam, ‘ADEPTflex-supporting dynamic changes of work-flows without losing control,’ Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, vol. 10, pp. 93–129, Mar. 1998.
S. Bandinelli, A. Fuggetta, and C. Ghezzi, ‘Process model evolution in the SPADE environment,’ IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 19, December 1993.
P. Jamart and A. van Lamsweerde, ‘A reflective approach to process model customization, enactment, and evolution,’ in Proceedings of the Third International Conference on the Software Process (ICSP3), (Reston, Virginia), pp. 21–32, IEEE Computer Society Press, October, 10-11 1994.
F. Casati, L. Jin, S. Ilnicki, and M. Shan, ‘eflow: an open, flexible, and configurable system for service composition,’ in Proceedings of the Workshop on E-Commerce and Web Information Systems, (Milpitas, CA, USA), June 2000.
R. Marshak, ‘InConcert workflow,’ Tech. Rep. 20,3, Workflow Computing Report, Patricia Seybold Group, 1997.
G. A. Bolcer and R. N. Taylor, ‘Endeavors: A process system integration infrastructure,’ in Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Software Process (ICSP4), (Brighton, UK), December 2–6 1996.
G. Cugola, E. Di Nitto, C. Ghezzi, and M. Mantione, ‘How to deal with deviations during process model enactment,’ in Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Software Engineering, (Seattle (Washington-USA)), April 1995.
S. Arbaoui and F. Oquendo, ‘Peace: Goal-oriented logic-based formalism for process modelling,’ in Software Process Modelling and Technology(A. Finkelstein, J. Kramer, and B. Nuseibeh, eds.), Research Studies Press, J. Wiley, 1994.
S. Arbaoui and F. Oquendo, ‘Managing inconsistencies between process enactment and process performance states,’ in Proceedings of the 8th International Software Process Workshop, (Wadern (Germany)), March 1993.
A. Reuter, K. Schneider, and F. Schwenkreis, ‘Contracts revisited,’ in Advanced Transaction Models and Architectures (S. Jajodia and L. Kerschberg, eds.), New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997.
J. Eder and W. Liebhart, ‘The Workflow Activity Model WAMO,’ in Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIs’95), (Wien, Austria), May 1995.
R. van Stiphout, T. D. Meijler, A. Aerts, D. Hammer, and R. le Comte, ‘TREX: Workflow transaction by means of exceptions,’ in Proceedings of the EDBT Workshop on Workflow Management Systems, (Valencia, Spain), Mar. 1998.
M. Kamath and K. Ramamritham, ‘Failure handling and coordinated execution of concurrent workflows,’ in Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Data Engineering(ICDE’98), (Orlando, FL, USA), Feb. 1998.
G. Alonso, M. Kamath, D. Agrawal, A. E. Abbadi, R. Gunthor, and C. Mohan, ‘Failure handling in large scale workflow management systems,’ Tech. Rep. RJ9913, IBM Almaden Research Center, Nov. 1994.
G. Alonso, D. Agrawal, A. E. Abbadi, M. Kamath, R. Gunthor, and C. Mohan, ‘Advanced transaction model in workflow context,’ in Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Data Engineering(ICDE’96), (New Orleans, LA, USA), Feb. 1996.
IBM, MQ Series Workflow-Concepts and Architectures, 1998.
Staware Corporation, Staware Global-Staware for Intranet based Workflow Automation, 1997._Available at http://www.staware.com/home/whitepapers/data/globalwp.htm.
Baan Company N.V.-COSA Soultions, COSA Reference Manual, 1998.
D. Chiu, K. Karlapalem, and Q. Li, ‘Exception handling with workflow evolution in ‘adome-wfms’: a taxonomy and resolution techniques,’ in Proceedings of the First Workshop on Adaptive Workflow Systems, (Seattle, Washington, USA), Nov. 1998. Available at http://ccs.mit.edu/klein/cscw98/paper06.
S. Bandinelli, E. Di Nitto, and A. Fuggetta, ‘Supporting cooperation in the spade-1 environment,’ IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 22, December 1996.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Casati, F., Cugola, G. (2001). Error Handling in Process Support Systems. In: Romanovsky, A., Dony, C., Knudsen, J.L., Tripathi, A. (eds) Advances in Exception Handling Techniques. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2022. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45407-1_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45407-1_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-41952-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45407-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive