Two-layer transaction management for workflow management applications

Workflow management applications require advanced transaction management that is not offered by traditional database systems. For this reason, a number of extended transaction models has been proposed in the past. None of these models seems completely adequate, though, because workflow management requires different transactional semantics on different process levels. In the WIDE ESPRIT project, a two-layer transaction management approach has been adopted to cope with this problem. The approach consists of a transaction model built from an orthogonal combination of two existing models and a transaction management architecture with two independent transaction managers. This architecture is integrated into the next generation of the commercial FORO distributed workflow management system.