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@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/adbis/BukhresZB97,
author = {Omran A. Bukhres and
Peng Zhang and
Boualem Benatallah},
title = {Modeling of Dynamic Internet Transactional Workflows},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the First East-European Symposium on Advances
in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS'97), St.-Petersburg,
September 2-5, 1997. Volume 1: Regular Papers},
publisher = {Nevsky Dialect},
year = {1997},
pages = {379-389},
ee = {db/conf/adbis/BukhresZB97.html},
crossref = {DBLP:conf/adbis/97},
bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de}
}
BibTeX
Today's business enterprises compete on a global scale in order to meet the competitive demands of the international market place. The Internet, which conveniently allows multiple customers and organizations to interact, is an excellent environment over which enterprises can build their WorkFlow Management Systems (WFMS). For example, many retail companies are building their Internet shopping systems. According to IUPUT, a prominent information technology market research firm, sales from online storefronts and Internet malls are expected to reach $230 billion by the year 2000. Wal-Mart, the largest retail company in U.S., enlarge their Internet shopping store by doubling the number of items available to 80,000 [30]. However, the current WorkFlow products which are based on the World Wide Web (WWW) lack important features such as integrated human access control and transaction management support due to the use of HTTP/CGI. Recently, using Java and the Object Management Group's (OMG) object request broker (ORB), researchers have proposed to build a world wide database (WWDB) [9, 25]. The combination of CORBA and Java seems to be suitable for Internet client/server requirement.
In this paper, through analysis of the unique requirements of the Internet shopping workflow environment, a transactional workflow model is proposed that supports dynamic creation of Internet workflow tasks and Internet workflow compensation tasks. This run-time task support gives the users more flexibility in the control of their workflows. Furthermore, the model provides users with flexible recovery mechanisms which are robust enough to meet the reliability requirements of the environment. Workflow tasks, task dependencies, and correctness criterion for the Internet shopping workflow are formally defined. Finally, we briefly describe an initial implementation of the model using CORBA and Java.
Copyright © 1997 by the ACM, Inc., used by permission. Permission to make digital or hard copies is granted provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage, and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation.