A Transactional Activity Model for Organizing Open-ended Cooperative Workflow Activities

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Pu, Calton
  • Meersman, Robert
  • Liu, Ling

• Technical report TR96-11. We propose a transactional activity model (TAM) for specification and management of open-ended cooperative activities. TAM is a careful combination of an activity composition model with extended transaction models such as split/join transactions. In contrast to each of the extended transaction models which focus more on a formal template for data processing patterns in an application, the activity model contains a set of formal templates, namely activity patterns, for capturing patterns of object interactions in an application. Using TAM, users may form new activity patterns by combining components of different existing patterns using activity pattern refinement and activity pattern composition mechanisms that include split and join of activities. At the same time, we have extended concepts and techniques developed for transaction processing. For example, activity histories are used to study the correctness of activity execution and activity restructuring through refinement, composition, split, or join. A key concept for dynamic restructuring of activities is to obtain added concurrency and improved cooperation by encouraging the releasing of some early committed resources or transferring ownership of uncommitted resources. Throughout the TAM development we promote the separation of activity specification from their transaction implementation mechanisms to allow reasoning about concurrency and recovery properties of TAM activities. | TRID-ID TR96-11

• Date created

  1996

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Extended transaction models
  • Distributed and heterogeneous systems
  • Open-ended activities
  • Cooperative activities

• Type of Item

  Report

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R31N7XQ4W

• License

  Attribution 3.0 International