Document Recovery in a Business Process using Activity Dependency

This paper focuses on the problem of bringing a business process document to a consistent state after exceptional occurrences. Although many traditional recovery methods can support exception handling, they are mainly concerned with process backtracking, forward stepping, and compensation. However, prior to the use of recovery algorithms, it is essential to find a rollback activity for organizations that aim to reduce their costs and increase their revenues. In this paper, two aspects of this issue were addressed: an algorithm that considers the inverse relationship between reparability and reactivity in finding a rollback activity, and a document recovery mechanism that recovers a document to a consistent version. A prototype system was implemented. Simulation results generated in an analysis of the various decision weight parameters showed that our mechanism can support different rollback activity decisions and document recovery strategies.