Apparatus and method for policy-driven business process exception handling

Abstract

A model-driven and QoS-aware infrastructure facilitates the scalable composition of Web services in highly dynamic environments. An exception management framework supports two modes of exception management for business processes, providing a novel policy-driven approach to exception management implemented in the system infrastructure. Exception management is implemented in the system infrastructure, with exception handling policies supplied by individual business processes. Using the exception management framework, developers define exception policies in a declarative manner. Before a business process is executed, the service composition middleware integrates the exception policies with normal business logic to generate a complete process schema. This policy driven-approach can significantly reduce the development time of business processes through its separation of the development of the business logic and the exception handling policies.

1 . A system for executing business process and handling runtime exceptions, comprising: 
 an aggregator that is able to integrate normal business logic with exception handling knowledge to generated extended business process definition; and    a business process engine that is able to execute business process definitions that contains knowledge on runtime exception handling.    
     
     
         2 . The system in  claim 1 , further comprising an exception handling policy repository that contains exception handling policies.  
     
     
         3 . The system in  claim 2 , wherein said exception handling policies includes said runtime exception specifications and exception handling action specifications  
     
     
         4 . The system in  claim 2 , wherein said business process engine can understand runtime exception specifications, detect runtime exceptions and execute exception handling actions.  
     
     
         5 . A method for executing business processes and handling runtime exceptions, comprising the steps of: 
 specifying exception handling knowledge from normal business process logic;    integrating normal business logic with exception handling knowledge to generate extended business process definitions;    executing business process definition that contains runtime exception handling knowledge;    detecting runtime exceptions; and    executing exception handling actions.    
     
     
         6 . The method in  claim 5 , further comprising the step of defining exception specification.  
     
     
         7 . The method in  claim 5 , further comprising the step of defining exception handling knowledge as exception handling policies.  
     
     
         8 . The method in  claim 5 , further comprising the step of checking the compatibility between the exception handling policies and normal business logic.  
     
     
         9 . The method in  claim 5 , further comprising the step of checking the conflicts among the exception handling policies.