Attaching transactional requirements to business process specifications

• Authors: Juha Puustjärvi
• Venue: SE '08 Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering
• Year: 2008

Using business process languages such as UML Activity Diagram or BPMN one can describe business process tasks, their temporal precedences and flows of control. However, describing their transactional requirements is outside their scope. This is regrettable, because without describing transactional properties in process specification the workflow engine is not able to run processes correctly. In this paper, we restrict ourselves to this problem. In particular, we present our developed notation for specifying the isolation and atomicity requirements of business processes. This notation is flexible in the sense that it allows to utilize the semantic information of applications and thus it allows much higher degree of concurrency than the traditional concurrency control methods. We also show how BPMN can be used in specifying the isolation and atomicity requirements, and how the requirements can be enforced in executing business processes. In particular, we show how timestamp ordering method can be applied in scheduling business processes