工作流事务的形式化描述和实现

Formal specification and implementation of workflow transaction

工作流事务是工作流技术本身亟待解决的难题之一,现有的众多工作流事务模型大多使用操作性的非形式化方式描述工作流的复杂语义,极大地限制了它们在复杂场景中的可用性,为此将事务的形式化描述和工作流的实际应用联系起来,提出了一种在工作流环境下管理长事务的方法.这种方法建立在事务补偿的基础上,通过允许过程出现环结构来处理任意过程结构,并通过引入一致点实现过程的部分补偿.形式化的事务模型描述以及基于集合论和图论表示的事务管理算法为工作流系统提供了清晰无歧义的事务语义.

The workflow transaction is one of the difficult problems which should be solved as soon as possible in workflow. Most existing transaction models implementing these models, however, have complex semantics with an operational, informal specification. This clearly limits their applicability in complex application scenarios. By bridging the gap between formal specification and practical application of workflow environments, an approach to long transaction management in workflow environments is presented, which is based on the well-known notion of compensation, but extended to deal with both arbitrary process structures to allow cycles in processes and consistent points to allow partial compensation of processes. A formal specification of the transaction model and transaction management algorithms in set and graph theory are presented to provide clear and unambiguous transaction semantics.