Abstract
A typical e-business transaction takes hours or days to complete, involves a number of partners, and comprises many failure points[8]. With short-lived transactions, database systems ensure atomicity by either committing all of the elements of the transaction, or by canceling all of them in case of a failure. With typical e-business transactions, strict atomicity is not practical, and we need a way of reversing the effects of those activities that cannot be rolled back: that is compensation. For a given business process, identifying the various failure points, and designing the appropriate compensation processes represents the bulk of process design effort[8]. Yet, business analysts have little or no guidance, as for a given failure point, there appears to be an infinite variety of ways to compensate for it. We recognize that compensation is a business issue, but we argue that it can be explained in terms of a handful of parameters within the context of REA ontology [20], including things such as the type of activity, the type of resource, and organizational policies. We propose a three-step process compensation design approach that 1) starts by abstracting a business process to focus on those activities that create/modify value, 2) compensates for those activities, individually, based on values of the compensation parameters, and 3) composes those compensations using a Saga-like approach [10]. In this paper, we present our approach, and discuss issues for future research.
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Boubaker, A., Mili, H., Charif, Y., Leshob, A. (2013). Towards a Framework for Modeling Business Compensation Processes. In: Nurcan, S., et al. Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling. BPMDS EMMSAD 2013 2013. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 147. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38484-4_11
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