Coping with mismatched semantics of dependencies in workflow applications

Abstract

A workfiow system may be built in a heterogeneous and autonomous distributed environment. Since the number of tasks constituting a workflow application can be enormous, the dependencies among some tasks must be specified and therefore subsequently enforced separately. Due to different visibilities of local systems to application and implementation of a worldiow system, the semantics viewed at these two levels may mismatch in terms of enforcibility of the dependencies. As a result, some dependencies which are enforcible as viewed by applications may be not enforcible as viewed by the underlying supporting system. In this paper, we study the problems related to enforcing dependencies under such diverse views, and propose approaches to coping with them.