Providing transactional properties for migrating workflows

Current workflow management systems have several limitations that need to be addressed by the research community. This paper deals with two of them: the lack of flexibility necessary in a changing business environment, and the lack of transactional guarantees for workflow applications. To handle the dynamic character of current business environments and processes, we have proposed the Migrating Workflow Model. A migrating workflow transfers its code ( specification) and its execution state to a site, negotiates a service to be executed on its behalf, receives the results, and moves on. The next place visited by the workflow, and the next service requested, is determined by both the objectives of the process and the results of the current requests. The transactional properties are addressed by merging of the Migrating Workflow Model with a Transactional Workflow Model, in which the workflow designer has the ability of specifying, independently, the task coordination requirements, the failure atomicity requirements, and the execution atomicity requirements. The result, described in this paper, is a migrating workflow model endowed with transactional properties that guarantee the correct execution of workflow applications in the presence of failures and in the presence of concurrent access to shared data.