Proactive Enforcement of Data Consistency by Business Processes

Data and its manipulation are essential in business processes (BPs). It is desirable to ensure within BP executions that every update to a database server guarantees to satisfy all relevant data integrity constraints (ICs). Furthermore, the earlier in a BP execution a violation is detected the more dependable the BP is. This paper studies the Process Safety Problem (PSP): will an incoming message be used in a database update causing IC violations? PSP is unsolvable in general. Taking advantage of the design-time "guard injection" technique, we propose a runtime proactive enforcement mechanism, called "process safe guarding", based on symbolic execution of BPEL processes for a bounded number of steps under "conservative strategy". Related challenges are also discussed.