Formal description and compensation implementation of workflow transaction

Workflow transaction is one of the most difficult workflow problems which should be solved as soon as possible. Most of the existing transaction models describes complex workflow semantics with an informal specification, thus limits their applicability in complex application scenarios. By relating formal specification and practical application of workflow environments, the paper presents an approach to long transaction management in workflow environments, the approach is based on the well-known notion of compensation, and it extends to deal with both arbitrary process structures to allow cycles in processes and through consistent points to allow partial compensation of processes. The paper also presents a formal description of the transaction model and transaction management algorithms in set and graph theory, provides clear and unambiguous transaction semantics.