关键词: 工作流, 失败处理, 工作流可靠性

Abstract: The workflow management technology is considered as an enabling technology for implementing Computer Integrated Management System (CIMS). It coordinates and controls the heterogeneous and autonomous application systems that are physically distributed in various network nodes in order to achieve business goal. Workflow management system provides the support for enacting key business processes of an enterprise. Therefore, its especially important to ensure the correctness and reliability of workflow execution in the presence of failure. In this paper, the reason for the workflow failure is analyzed and a hierarchy failure model is presented. Based on the model, a multi-level log policy for handling the failure is adopted, which will bring workflow system to the mostly-recent-consistent-state before failure occurs and continue to navigate the business process from the consistent state. As a result, more useful works are saved and the performance of workflow management will be improved.

Key words: workflow, failure handling, workflow reliability