Exotica/FMQM: A Persistent Message-Based Architecture for Distributed Workflow Management

Abstract

In the past few years there has been an increasing interest in workflow applications as a way of supporting complex business processes in modern corporations. Given the nature of the environment and the technology involved, workflow applications are inherently distributed and pose many interesting challenges to the system designer. In most cases, a client/server architecture is used in which knowledge about the processes being executed is centralized in one node to facilitate monitoring, auditing, and to simplify synchronization. In this paper, we explore a novel distributed architecture, Exotica/FMQM, for workflow systems in which the need for such a centralized database is eliminated. Instead, we use persistent messages as the means to store the information relevant to the execution of a business process. Our approach is to completely distribute the execution of a process so individual nodes are independent. The advantages of this approach are increased resilience to failures and greater scalability and flexibility of the system configuration.

Workflow-Management-Systems as enterprise engineering tools

“…Even though a lot of products are already available, a lot of research has to be done to make these systems more useful for enterprise integration on a large scale. By far not all requirements listed in the previous chapter are fulfilled by existing systems, see Alonso (1994), Georgakapoulos (1994), Jablonski (1994), Marshak {1993). In Section 3.5 one WFMS called MOBILE is discussed.…”

“…Applications of WFMS can be found in various publications, see Alonso (1994), Blumenfeld {1993), Breitbart (1993), Jablonski (1995), Medina-Mores (1992), Georgakapoulos (1994). Two of them are described in the following in more detail since they have interesting characteristics, which are very important in the area of enterprise integration.…”

“…Publications are showing only high level architectures so that no real comparison can be provided, see Alonso (1994), Georgakapoulos (1994), McCarthy (1993), Woetzel (1993. However, directions can be observed which we want to mention here.…”

A Flexible Method Using Identity Based Message Key Distribution for Securing Workflow Signatures

“…This way, an enterprise can improve the speed as well as quality of the business processes by focusing on the core competencies among various organizations and thus they can reduce overall business cost. And this is whythe inter-organizational workflows such as ERP [2], SCM [3] and Cross Flow [4]play a vital role in running business process executions in a dynamic and timely manner.Briefly a cross organizational workflow management system controls and models the manual as well as automated activities between organizations [5].A workflow can be defined as the automation of a business process in which various tasks are passed from one participant to another as per a set of rules. Basically a workflow may consist of a number of tasks and each of these tasks should be authenticated by using any of the cryptographic techniques.…”

XML–Based Schema Definition for Support of Interorganizational Workflow

“…A second important feature is that XRL lends itself well to both distributed and asynchronous modes of operation. Section 3 will describe a distributed architecture, which is more scalable and reliable than a centralized one [12]. Moreover, in many real applications (e.g., in supply chain management [13,14,31]), asynchronous transmission of messages can be more reliable and efficient than synchronous transmission.…”