A taxonomy of transactional workflow support

Structured business processes are the veins of complex business organizations. Workflows have generally been accepted as a means to model and support these processes, be they interactive or completely automated. The fact that these processes require robustness and clear semantics has generally been observed and has led to the combination of workflow and transaction concepts. Many variations on this combination exist, leading to many approaches to transactional workflow support. No clear classification of these approaches has been developed, however, resulting in a badly understood field. To deal with this problem, we describe a clear taxonomy of transactional workflow models in this paper, based on the relation between workflow and transaction concepts. We show that the classes in the taxonomy can be directly related to specification language and architecture types for workflow and transaction management systems. We compare the various classes with respect to their characteristics and place existing approaches in the taxonomy. We cover both "traditional" workflow approaches and more recent web-based approaches, including inter-organizational workflow approaches. Together, this paper offers a well-structured and concise analysis of the field of transactional business process support.