Modeling Exception Flows in Integration Systems

Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP) are a collection of widely used patterns for integrating enterprise applications and business processes. These patterns represent a "de-facto" standard for design decisions when integrating enterprise applications. In previous work, the EIP control and data flow syntax and semantics have been expressed in the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) as a semantic model for message-based integration. However, exceptions during message processing were left for further studies. In this work, we specify common exceptional situations in integration systems and derive exception types, for which we define a compliant representation in BPMN, resulting in general patterns for exception handling and compensation. The patterns extend previous work by the Exception Flow, evaluated syntactically and semantically for representative integration scenarios.