Correctness issues in workflow management

Abstract

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.