Dynamic workflow management in CORBA distributed object systems

Abstract

We are beginning to see distributed dynamic workflow management systems being implemented using CORBA services. However, these systems do not use events as the mechanism for co-ordinating workflows. Instead, workflow components use messages to communicate with each other, thereby resulting in tightly coupled systems. We investigate the use of events as the co-ordinating mechanism for implementing dynamic event-based workflow solutions using existing CORBA services. This paper shows the limitations of the CORBA Event Service for dynamic workflow solutions based on a prototype implementation and proposes a more specialised Workflow Event Channel (WEC) that overcomes these limitations. A CORBA implementation of the WEC design enables event-based workflow execution environments within a CORBA framework.