USING DISTRIBUTED OBJECT MIDDLEWARE TO IMPLEMENT SCALABLE WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Schuster, H. | Neeb, J. | Schamburger, R.

Affiliations: MCC, Austin, TX | University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Department of Computer Science, Erlangen, Germany

Abstract: Support of distributed workflow execution and scalability are important issues for workflow management systems. Many cooperating workflow servers should build up a distributed workflow management system to meet the requirements especially of large enterprises. In these enterprises, access to workflows is usually restricted by certain organizational. Consequently, if an agent wants to start a workflow, only a small subset of the workflow servers of the enterprise is eligible to serve this request. One of them has to be selected. In this paper, we develop a formalization of these organizational rules and we provide a generally applicable distributed execution model for workflows, which is based on the distributed execution of subworkflows. This model is implemented by an advanced distributed object middleware. The distributed object system uses the organizational rules to implement the coordination among the workflow servers and to implement the load balancing and scheduling of workflow instances.

Journal: Journal of Integrated Design & Process Science, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 1-19, 1999