A Portable Approach to Exception Handling in Workflow Management Systems

Although the efforts from the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) led to the definition of a standard process definition language (XPDL), there is still no standard for the definition of expected exceptions in workflows. Yet, the very few Workflow Management Systems (WfMC) capable of managing exceptions, provide a proprietary exception handling unit, preventing workflow exception definitions from being portable from one system to another one. In this paper, we show how generic process definitions based on XPDL can be seamlessly enriched with standard-conform exception handling constructs, starting from a high-level event-condition-action language. We further introduce a suitable rule compiler, enabling to yield portable process and exception definitions in a fully automated way.