An environment for designing exceptions in workflows

摘要

When designing a workflow schema, the workflow designer must often explicitly deal with exceptional situations, such as abnormal process termination or suspension of task execution. This paper shows how the designer can be supported by tools allowing him to capture exceptional behavior within a workflow schema, by reusing an available set of pre-configured exceptions skeletons. Exceptions are expressed by means of triggers, to be executed on the top of an active database environment. In particular, the paper deals with the handling of typical workflow exceptional situations which are modeled as generic exception skeletons to be included in a new workflow schema by simply specializing or instantiating them. Such skeletons, called patterns, are stored in a catalog; the paper describes the catalog structure and its management tools constituting an integrated environment for pattern-based exception design and reuse.