Terminability and compensatibility of cycles in business processes with a process-oriented triggrer

Abstract

BPTrigger is a process-oriented trigger model that provides economy of specification and efficient execution for complex business constraints. An essential part of trigger execution is detection and resolution of cycles. This paper presents an approach to determine the terminability of a cycle introduced by a BPTrigger in a business process and determine whether a cycle is allowable in terms of compensatibility. The foundation of the approach is a set of conditions for cycle termination derived from classifications of business processes by resource usage and activity types by compensation status. This paper formally presents cycle analysis procedures using the notion of cycle analysis graph. Further, a procedure is proposed which checks the terminability of multiple cycles using a composite cycle analysis graph constructed from the cycle analysis graphs of the associated cycles. The paper proves the correctness of the analysis and presents a validation example. The presented results extend some limitations of well-formed sphere which has addressed atomicity of workflow transactions. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.