Distributed Global Transaction Support for Workflow Management Applications

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 report 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 FORO workflow management system. ♣ The work presented in this report is supported by the European Commission in the WIDE Project (ESPRIT No. 20280). Partners in WIDE are Sema Group sae and Hospital General de Manresa in Spain, Politectnico di Milano in Italy, ING Bank and University of Twente in the Netherlands.