Research On Application Of A Saga-based Advanced Model To Workflow System

The workflow technology is one of the key technologies of the development of enterprise information systems. But the transactions in enterprise business processes challenge the traditional transaction theories. In general, these advanced transactions are long-lived, complicated, and distributed. To solve these problems, many advanced transactions models are presented. But most of them can not be employed in realistic workflow systems, because of their complicated structures or difficulties in implementation. Saga is one of advanced transaction models, which aim to solve long-lived transactions. It divides a long-lived transaction into atomic traditional transactions, which can be committed respectively. Compensate activities are employed to guarantee the ACID characteristics of the whole transaction. This paper presents Xsaga (extend Saga), a new advanced transaction model, which is based on Saga model and mixed with JTA technology. Xsaga model enlarges the granularity of the atomic transactions and decreases the number of the needed compensate activities. It supports the distributed environment and extends the scope the transactional resources.The formal description and implementation of the Xsaga model are presented. And this model is combined with OFBIZ (Open For Business), a standard implementation of the workflow management system reference model, and is used in BS185, a realistic business system. It is proved to be a fine solution of some long-lived transactions, which satisfy some conditions.