The Mentor project: steps towards enterprise-wide workflowmanagement

摘要

Enterprise-wide workflow management where workflows may spanmultiple organizational units require particular consideration ofscalability, heterogeneity, and availability issues. The Mentor project,introduced in this paper, aims to reconcile a rigorous workflowspecification method with a distributed middleware architecture as astep towards enterprise-wide solutions. The project uses the formalismof state and activity charts and a commercial tool, Statemate, forworkflow specification. A first prototype of Mentor has been built whichallows executing specifications in a distributed manner. A majorcontribution of this paper is the method for transforming a centralizedstate chart specification into a form that is amenable to a distributedexecution and to incorporate the necessary synchronization betweendifferent processing entities. Fault tolerance issues are addressed bycoupling Mentor with the Tuxedo TP monitor