Recovery in Workflow Management Systems

Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) have been strongly tied to the database technology by most commercial and research models. This link came without a lot of consideration to the differences between the two environments. Therefore, it is important to consider each technology requirements during the design and implementation. I/O automata are ideal to model Workflows, where workflows are considered as black boxes (automata) with only inputs and outputs visible to the outside world. The recovery system uses I/O automata to model recovery-workflows too. In addition, forward recovery is important to use in WFMS, because undo and rollback recoveries can only be good for DBMS.