Exception Handling in Web Service Processes

Cross-company business processes are common in today’s networked economy and are nowadays often supported by process support systems that integrate the information systems of the different partners based on web service technology. In contrast to earlier Workflow Management Systems, which were often deployed in the controlled environment of a single company, the distributed nature of modern solutions make company-spanning web service processes more susceptible to failures. Therefore, it is desirable to augment the process models already at design time with error-handling behavior such that disrupted process instances can for instance be rolled back or completed on an alternative execution path, if, e.g., an individual service is not reachable. In this chapter, we will give an overview of past and current approaches as well as potential future works to exception handling in web service processes. We start with the concepts that were developed in the area of Workflow Management Systems, continue with error-handling techniques in state-of-the-art process modeling languages and finally give an outlook on future automated approaches to error recovery and repair.