Confirmation: A Solution for Non-Compensatability in Workflow Applications

The notion of a compensation is widely used in advanced transaction models as means of recovery from a failure. Similar concepts are adopted for providing “transaction-like” behavior for long business processes supported by workflows technology. Generally, designing a compensating task in the context of a workflow process is a non-trivial job. In fact, not every task is compensatable. This work contributes to the study of the non-compensatability problem. A compensating task C of a task T semantically undoes the effect of T after T has been committed. For example, the compensating task of a deposit is a withdrawal. For a task to be compensatable, it must satisfy two conditions.