Pervasive Workflows

Electronic commerce applications have become the
standard support for B2B and B2C collaborations. The
concept of workflow has been the main enabler
concept for such applications. Workflow technologies
indeed make it possible to leverage the
functionalities of multiple service providers to
build value-added services. Typical workflows
however rely on a centralized coordinator in charge
of managing the workflow execution. New trends in
collaborative business applications however call for
more flexibility. As a result, the centralized
coordination paradigm is no longer suitable to
adequately support the execution of recent business
applications. In this book we present a
decentralized workflow management system to overcome
this limitation. The main contribution of this book
is the design and implementation of a full-fledged
distributed workflow management system. The workflow
architecture that we developed supports the
execution of workflows in environments whereby
resources offered by each partner can be used by any
party within the surroundings of that partner.

Autorentext

Frederic MONTAGUT is a Senior Researcher with SAP. Frederic holdsan engineering diploma from Telecom INT, a M.Sc. in Network andDistributed Systems from Nice University, and a PhD in ComputerScience from Telecom Paristech. His research interests range fromdistributed workflow systems, workflow coordination to workflowsecurity.

Klappentext

Electronic commerce applications have become the standard support for B2B and B2C collaborations. The concept of workflow has been the main enabler concept for such applications. Workflow technologies indeed make it possible to leverage the functionalities of multiple service providers to build value-added services. Typical workflows however rely on a centralized coordinator in charge of managing the workflow execution. New trends in collaborative business applications however call for more flexibility. As a result, the centralized coordination paradigm is no longer suitable to adequately support the execution of recent business applications. In this book we present a decentralized workflow management system to overcome this limitation. The main contribution of this book is the design and implementation of a full-fledged distributed workflow management system. The workflow architecture that we developed supports the execution of workflows in environments whereby resources offered by each partner can be used by any party within the surroundings of that partner.