Retry scopes to enable robust workflow execution in pervasive environments

Abstract

Recent workflow languages are designed to serve the needs of business processes running in an unambiguous world based on unambiguous data. In contrast to business processes, processes running in a real world environment have to deal with data uncertainty and instability of the execution environment. Building a workflow language for real world flows based on a workflow language for business processes therefore may need additional modeling elements to be able to deal with this uncertainty and instability. Based on a real world process scenario we analyse and derive requirements for workflow language extensions for real world processes. The contributions provided by this paper are at first to investigate, how a workflow language can be extended properly followed up by the definition of workflow language extensions for real world processes, whereas the extensions are motivated by the real world process scenario. In this paper we use the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) as extension foundation. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.