The MENTOR workbench for enterprise-wide workflow management

Abstract

MENTOR (“Middleware for Enterprise-Wide Workflow Management”) is a joint project of the University of the Saarland, the Union Bank of Switzerland, and ETH Zurich [1, 2, 3]. The focus of the project is on enterprise-wide workflow management. Workflows in this category may span multiple organizational units each unit having its own workflow server, involve a variety of heterogeneous information systems, and require many thousands of clients to interact with the workflow management system (WFMS). The project aims to develop a scalable and highly available environment for the execution and monitoring of workflows, seamlessly integrated with a specification and verification environment. For the specification of workflows, MENTOR utilizes the formalism of state and activity charts. The mathematical rigor of the specification method establishes a basis for both correctness reasoning and for partitioning of a large workflow into a number of subworkflows according to the organizational responsibilities of the enterprise. For the distributed execution of the partitioned workflow specification, MENTOR relies mostly on standard middleware components and adds own components only where the standard components fall short of functionality or scalability. In particular, the run-time environment is based on a TP monitor and a CORBA implementation.