Design and Implementation of a Distributed Workflow Management System: METUFlow

Abstract

Workflows are activities involving the coordinated execution of multipletasks performed by different processing entities, mostly in distributedheterogeneous environments which are very common in enterprises of evenmoderate complexity. Centralized workflow systems fall short to meet thedemands of such environments.This paper describes the design and implementation of a distributedworkflow management system, namely, METUFlow. The main contribution ofthis prototype is to provide a truly distributed execution environment,where the scheduler, the history manager and the worklist manager of thesystem are fully distributed giving rise to failure resiliency andincreased performance.