Correctness issues in workflow management
Correctness issues in workflow management
复制标题
工作流程管理的正确性问题
DOI：
10.1088/0967-1846/3/4/002
复制
发表时间：
1996
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
T. Fonseca
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
T. Fonseca
工作流管理是一种对构成复杂流程（例如业务流程）的步骤的执行进行集成和自动化的技术。工作流管理系统（WFMS）主要从工业中发展而来，以满足企业对办公自动化工具日益增长的需求。巧合的是，数据库研究人员开发了几种扩展事务模型来处理类似的应用。尽管两个领域的目标相同，但它们关注的问题却不同。工作流领域主要关注建模方面，以准确捕捉构成工作流的步骤之间的数据和控制流需求，而数据库领域则关注正确性方面，以确保构成一个事务的子事务的数据一致性。然而，我们现在看到一些理念的融合，工作流管理系统逐渐提供了额外的功能。本文概述了工作流管理中的正确性。正确性是工作流管理系统的一个重要方面，工作流管理系统开发人员和工作流设计人员对现有概念和技术的正确理解将有助于构建足够灵活以捕捉现实世界应用需求且足够稳健以提供必要的正确性和可靠性属性的工作流。我们首先列举为确保数据一致性必须考虑的正确性问题。然后我们综述了在工作流管理系统中已提出或正在使用的用于确保工作流正确性的技术。这些技术来自工作流管理、扩展事务模型、多数据库和事务性工作流等领域。最后，我们提出了在并发和故障情况下与工作流正确性相关的一些未解决的问题。
Workflow management is a technique to integrate and automate the execution of steps that comprise a complex process, e.g., a business process. Workflow management systems (WFMSs) primarily evolved from industry to cater to the growing demand for office automation tools among businesses. Coincidentally, database researchers developed several extended transaction models to handle similar applications. Although the goals of both the communities were the same, the issues they focused on were different. The workflow community primarily focused on modelling aspects to accurately capture the data and control flow requirements between the steps that comprise a workflow, while the database community focused on correctness aspects to ensure data consistency of sub-transactions that comprise a transaction. However, we now see a confluence of some of the ideas, with additional features being gradually offered by WFMSs. This paper provides an overview of correctness in workflow management. Correctness is an important aspect of WFMSs and a proper understanding of the available concepts and techniques by WFMS developers and workflow designers will help in building workflows that are flexible enough to capture the requirements of real world applications and robust enough to provide the necessary correctness and reliability properties. We first enumerate the correctness issues that have to be considered to ensure data consistency. Then we survey techniques that have been proposed or are being used in WFMSs for ensuring correctness of workflows. These techniques emerge from the areas of workflow management, extended transaction models, multidatabases and transactional workflows. Finally, we present some open issues related to correctness of workflows in the presence of concurrency and failures.