Distributed Workflow upon Linkable Coordination Artifacts

Coordination infrastructures can be used for the general-purpose support of WfMSs (workflow management systems). Suitably-expressive coordination artifacts can be specialised as workflow engines, encapsulating workflow rules expressed in terms of coordination laws.

In this paper, we focus on the issue of inter-organisational workflow (IOW), and show how the issue of multiple, interdependent, distributed workflows requires coordination artifacts to be linkable, so as to create a network of inter-connected coordination flows.

After discussing a model of workflow engine based on ReSpecT tuple centres, we introduce a distributed workflow architecture based on TuCSoN, exploiting a logic-based workflow language. In particular, we focus on the definition of a scoping mechanism, and show how this enable workflows to be dynamically governed and distributed upon a coordination infrastructure based on artifact linkability. An example of a VE (virtual enterprise) workflow is finally discussed.