Transaction-oriented work-flow concepts in inter-organizational environments

Abstract

Workflow techniques have gained a lot of attention as a means to support business process re-engineering but also as a means to integrate legacy systems. Most workflow models view the applications as a fixed set of tasks. In this paper we analyse inter-organisational application domains and analyse properties for transactional workflows and systems supporting them. We study a workflow model for the applications where job step instances cannot be fixed in advance. We analyse requirements arising from this kind of environments through a particular application, and introduce special modelling components to support these requirements. We also develop the concept of C-unit to cope with concurrency anomalies and recovery.