On the development of a multiple-compensation mechanism for business transactions

Compensation is a widely used concept for maintaining atomicity in both the advanced transaction models and transactional workflow systems. Some Web service protocols also adopt the compensation mechanism for failure recovery when providing transaction management. However, the compensation mechanisms used in these models or protocols are too fixed and cannot satisfy the various requirements of different applications. In this paper, a multiple-compensation mechanism is proposed and defined explicitly in a business process model. An algorithm on how to implement this multiple-compensation mechanism for backward recovery is designed and its computation complexity is analysed.