The Mentor Project: Steps Towards Enterprise–Wide Workflow Management

Enterprise–wide workflow management where workflows may span multiple organizational units require particular consideration of scalability, heterogeneity, and availability issues. The Mentor project which is introduced in this paper aims to reconcile a rigorous workflow specification method with a distributed middleware architecture as a step towards enterprise–wide solutions. The project uses the formalism of state and activity charts and a commercial tool, Statemate, for workflow specification. A first prototype of Mentor has been built which allows executing specifications in a distributed manner. A major contribution of this paper is the method for transforming a centralized state chart specification into a form that is amenable to a distributed execution and to incorporate the necessary synchronization between different processing entities. Fault tolerance issues are addressed by coupling Mentor with the Tuxedo TP monitor.