A Taxonomy for Transactional Workflows

Workflows have generally been accepted as a means to model and support processes in complex organizations, be they interactive or completely automated. The fact that these processes require robustness and clear semantics has generally been observed and has lead to the combination of workflow and transaction concepts. Many variations on this combination exist, leading to many approaches to transactional workflow support. No clear classification of these approaches has been developed, however, resulting in a badly understood field. To deal with this problem, we describe a clear taxonomy of transactional workflow models in this report, based on the relation between workflow and transaction concepts. We show that the classes in the taxonomy can be directly related to specification language and architecture types for workflow and transaction management systems. We compare the various classes with respect to their characteristics and place existing approaches in the taxonomy. Together, this report offers a basis for analysis of transactional workflow support.