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Abstract : |
Key limitations of the state-of-art workflow products and research prototypes include the lack of adequate support for functioning in heterogeneous environments that involve humans and automated tasks distributed across enterprises, limited scalability, and the lack of adequate support for dealing with errors and failures in real-world organizational settings. Emergence of network computing based on Web and distributed object management provide an attractive infrastructure to address these issues. Workflow management techniques developed in the METEOR 2 project are intended to reliably support coordination of user and automated tasks in real-world multi-enterprise heterogeneous computing environments. Key capabilities of the METEOR 2 workflow management system (WFMS) include a comprehensive toolkit for building workflows (map/data/task design) and supporting high-level process modeling, detailed workflow specification, and automatic code generation for its workflow enactment systems- WEBWork and ORBWork. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of ORBWork, reliable and fully distributed a CORBA-based enactment system for the METEOR 2 WFMS. In addition to providing coordination capabilities in a heterogeneous and distributed environment, ORBWork supports scalable software architecture, multi-database access, as well as an error detection and recovery framework that uses transactional concepts. The recovery framework is based on a hierarchical error model, and includes mechanisms for persistence, monitoring and recovery of workflow system components. 1, |
