Workflow modeling: exception and failure handling representation

The representation of the activities that compose the workflow processes, their execution sequence and relationships, the agents responsible for their execution, and the resources that are used during execution, is known as workflow modeling. Several techniques are being proposed to model workflow. One of them is to express the workflow model using the temporal object oriented data model TF-ORM (M. Nicolai and N. Eidelweiss, 1998). The occurrence of failures and exceptions during workflow execution may cause serious problems, especially in mission-critical applications. The paper shows how the TF-ORM formalism, when used to model workflow, allows the representation of several exceptions and the definition of information to be used for systems recovery