Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science and Information Systems Working Paper CSIS 2004-004 A Backward Recovery Mechanism for Workflow Management

Compensation is widely used in advanced transaction models as a means of backward recovery from a failure. However, traditional compensation notions are not sufficient for handling failures in business processes if state changes involve consumable resources that cannot be undone. This paper presents a backward recovery mechanism to support the business process management domain. The proposed mechanism resets a business process to an acceptable state by reexecuting all or a part of its activities that are failed or already completed successfully. The paper classifies backward recovery types into compensate, rework, and complement, and discusses their semantics. Then, the paper classifies the types of process activities based on resource constraints. By exploiting the meaning of activity types and backward recovery types, the paper presents guidelines that determine if a business process can be restored to an acceptable state.