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

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