Survey of Exception Handling Capabilities

The exception patterns identified in this body of work were used to assess the exception handling capabilities of eight PAIS and business process modelling languages. The results of this survey are captured in Table 2. They provide a salient insight into how little of the research into exception handling has been implemented in commercial offerings.

Only deadline expiry enjoys widespread support although its overall flexibility is limited in many tools. Only two of the offerings examined provide support for handling work items failures - generally via user-initiated aborts. There was also minimal support for external triggers and constraint violation management amongst the workflow tools with only Staffware and COSA, and FLOWer respectively supporting these exception classes. The business process languages (XPDL, BPEL and BPMN) provide better support across most areas although only for active work items. None of the offerings examined provided exception support for managing resource unavailability (and as a consequence this column has been omitted from Table 2) - this reflects other research findings [RAHE05] on the lack of support for the resource perspective in current commercial products.

Table 2: Support for Exception Patterns

Offering

Exceptions

 

Work Item Failure

Work Item Deadline

External Trigger

Constraint Violation

Staffware Process Suite v9

 

OCO-CWC-COM
ACA-CWC-COM
OFF-CWC-COM
AFF-CWC-COM
SCE-CWC-COM

OCO-CWC-NIL
ACA-CWC-NIL
SCE-CWC-NIL
SCE-CWC-COM
 

Websphere MQ 3.4
(IBM)

 

OCO-CWC-NIL
ACA-CWC-NIL
SCE-CWC-NIL

   

FLOWer 3.1
(Pallas Athena)

  AFC-CWC-NIL
SFC-CWC-NIL
 

AFC-CWC-NIL
SFC-CWC-NIL
AFC-CWC-COM
SFC-CWC-COM

Cosa 5.1
(Transflow)

SFF-CWC-RBK OCO-CWC-COM
ACA-CWC-COM
SCE-CWC-COM
OCO-CWC-COM
ACA-CWC-COM
SCE-CWC-COM
 

iPlanet Integ. Server 3.1 (Sun)

(OFF|OFC|AFF|AFC|SRS|SFC|SFF)-(CWC|RCC)-(NIL|COM)    

XPDL 2.0
(WfMC)

SFF-CWC-COM
SFF-CWC-NIL
SFF-RCC-COM
SFF-RCC-NIL

SCE-CWC-COM
SCE-CWC-NIL
SFF-CWC-COM
SFF-CWC-NIL
SFF-RCC-COM
SFF-RCC-NIL

SFF-CWC-COM
SFF-CWC-NIL
SFF-RCC-COM
SFF-RCC-NIL
SFF-CWC-COM
SFF-CWC-NIL
SFF-RCC-COM
SFF-RCC-NIL

BPEL 1.1

SFF-CWC-COM
SFF-CWC-NIL
SFF-RCC-COM
SFF-RCC-NIL
SCE-CWC-COM
SCE-CWC-NIL
SFF-CWC-COM
SFF-CWC-NIL
SFF-RCC-COM
SFF-RCC-NIL
SCE-CWC-COM
SCE-CWC-NIL
SFF-CWC-COM
SFF-CSC-NIL
SFF-RCC-COM
SFF-RCC-NIL
 

BPMN 1.0
(OMG)

SFF-CWC-COM
SFF-CWC-NIL
SFC-CWC-COM
SFC-CWC-NIL
SRS-CWC-COM
SRS-CWC-NIL
SFF-RCC-COM
SFF-RCC-NIL

SFF-CWC-COM
SFF-CWC-NIL
SFC-CWC-COM
SFC-CWC-NIL
SRS-CWC-COM
SRS-CWC-NIL
SFF-RCC-COM
SFF-RCC-NIL

SFF-CWC-COM
SFF-CWC-NIL
SFC-CWC-COM
SFC-CWC-NIL
SRS-CWC-COM
SRS-CWC-NIL
SFF-RCC-COM
SFF-RCC-NIL

SFF-CWC-COM
SFF-CWC-NIL
SFC-CWC-COM
SFC-CWC-NIL
SRS-CWC-COM
SRS-CWC-NIL
SFF-RCC-COM
SFF-RCC-NIL

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