TxFlowGen: Generation of Failure Atomic transactional workflows for B2B applications

Abstract

The Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) is a standard for business process modeling which provides notation for expressing complex business process semantics in the form of a workflow. The workflow represents an abstraction of real work as a sequence of connected steps. When multiple organizations are involved in offering a service to the consumers, workflow can be used to define the execution order of the processes. Whenever, a workflow involves a composition of multiple services offered by different organizations, the behaviour of any given service may affect other services and the overall reliability of the workflow. A transactional workflow is considered reliable, if its execution satisfies the Failure Atomicity Requirements (FAR). For example, failure of a payment service requires undoing the order processing service that has been completed already. Thus, it is necessary to represent behavioural dependencies among the constituent services of the workflow and generate its FAR which is useful for checking the reliability of the workflow. However, existing workflow generation tools and methodologies do not model the transactional workflows which depict the transactional dependencies among the services involved in the workflows. Towards fulfilling this need, the present work proposes a pattern based modeling approach to construct transactional workflows. This approach involves the identification of FAR of each service in the workflow.