Abstract
Current workflow management systems have several limitations that need to be addressed by the research community. This paper deals with two of them: the lack of flexibility necessary in a changing business environment, and the lack of transactional guarantees for workflow applications.
To handle the dynamic character of current business environments and processes, we have proposed the Migrating Workflow Model. A migrating workflow transfers its code (specification) and its execution state to a site, negotiates a service to be executed on its behalf, receives the results, and moves on. The next place visited by the workflow, and the next service requested, is determined by both the objectives of the process and the results of the current requests.
The transactional properties are addressed by merging of the Migrating Workflow Model with a Transactional Workflow Model, in which the workflow designer has the ability of specifying, independently, the task coordination requirements, the failure atomicity requirements, and the execution atomicity requirements. The result, described in this paper, is a migrating workflow model endowed with transactional properties that guarantee the correct execution of workflow applications in the presence of failures and in the presence of concurrent access to shared data.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
D. Barbara, S. Mehrotra and M. Rusinkiewicz, INCAS: Managing dynamic workflows in distributed environments, Journal of Database Management 7(1) (1996).
P.A. Bernstein and N. Goodman, Timestamp-based algorithms for concurrency control in distributed database systems, in: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), Montreal, Quebec, Canada, October 1–3 (IEEE, 1980) pp. 285–300.
P. Cederqvist et al., Version management with CVS, Signum Support AB (1993), ftp://ftp.cebaf.gov/pub/marki/slow/cvs.ps
A. Cichocki, Migrating workflows and their transactional properties, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Houston (1999).
A. Cichocki, A. Helal, M. Rusinkiewicz and D. Woelk, Workflow and Process Automation: Concepts and Technology (Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, 1998).
A. Cichocki and M. Rusinkiewicz, Migrating workflows, in: Advances in Workflow Management Systems and Interoperability, NATO Advanced Study Institute, NATO, Istambul, Turkey (August 1997) pp. 311–326.
D. Georgakopoulos, H. Schuster, D. Baker and A. Cichocki, Managing process and service fusion in virtual enterprises, Information Systems, Special Issue on Information Systems Support for Electronic Commerce 24(6) (1999) 429–456.
R.S. Gray, Agent Tcl: A flexible and secure mobile-agent system, in: Proceedings of the 4th Annual Usenix Tcl/Tk Workshop (1996).
S. Green, L. Hurst, B. Nangle, P. Cunningham, F. Somers and R. Evans, Software agents: A review (May 1997), http://www.cs.tcd.ie/Brenda.Nangle/iag.html
K. Jensen, Coloured Petri Nets: A high level language for system design and analysis, in: Advances in Petri Nets, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 483 (Springer, Berlin, 1990) pp. 342–416.
P. Krychniak, M. Rusinkiewicz, A. Cichocki, A. Sheth and G. Thomas, Bounding the effects of compensation under relaxed multi-level serializability, International Journal of Parallel and Distributed Databases 4 (1996) 355–374.
M. Rusinkiewicz, A. Cichocki and L. Ness, Towards a transactional model for workflows, in: Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium on Applied Corporate Computing, Monterrey, Mexico (October 1995) pp. 29–38.
M. Rusinkiewicz, W. Klas, T. Tesch, J. Waesch and P. Muth, Towards a cooperative transaction model, in: The Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Zurich (1995).
M. Rusinkiewicz, P. Krychniak and A. Cichocki, Towards a model for multidatabase transactions, International Journal of Intelligent and Cooperative Information Systems 1(3–4) (1993) 579–617.
J. Wäsch and W. Klas, History merging as a mechanism for concurrency control in cooperative environments, in: Proceedings of RIDE-Interoperability of Nontraditional Database Systems, New Orleans, USA (February 1996).
J. White, Telescript technology: Mobile agents, White Paper of General Magic (1996).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Cichocki, A., Rusinkiewicz, M. Providing Transactional Properties for Migrating Workflows. Mobile Networks and Applications 9, 473–480 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:MONE.0000034701.73879.cf
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:MONE.0000034701.73879.cf