Extending the concept of transaction compensation

Abstract

The ability to compensate for previous activities, often in the case of failure or exceptional events, is an important feature of long-running business transactions. In this paper, we present several extensions to existing notions of compensation for business transactions. The extensions are described using a business process modeling language called StAC (Structured Activity Compensation) but are also placed in the context of IBM's BPBeans (Business Process Beans) enterprise technology. The meaning of the compensation mechanisms is made precise, as are issues of compensation scoping in multilevel transactions. The compensation extensions result in flexible and powerful mechanisms for modeling and implementing long-running business transactions.