Compensability of business processes

Abstract

When a business process executed in a SOA environment cannot fully achieve its goal, it should perform a compensation of its already completed activities. This method is widely used by the standards related to the executing of business processes in SOA environments. Many of the specifications relative to the types of process coordination, execution languages and notations which are used to design business processes are based on this approach. Unfortunately, there is no specification which provides mechanisms that guarantee the possibility of compensation. The lack of such mechanisms may lead to the situations which in the BPMN standard are defined as "hazardous". They occur when an execution of a process can neither be completed nor fully compensated. The result of this process is undetermined, inconsistent with intentions of a designer of a process and can lead to the loss of consistency. These cases often enforce manual engagement in resolving the situation and are a serious problem if we deal with numerous instances of processes. This article focuses on this issue, presents its analysis as well as a solution to it. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.