Architectures and Techniques for Large-Scale, Distributed Workflow Management on the Internet

The Internet is providing worldwide connectivity for business organizations and has created a much greater opportunity for people to collaborate remotely. However, working on the Internet can be inefficient due to the Internet latency resulting from uncontrolled Internet traffic and finite bandwidth. In this paper, we investigate several research problems in distributed workflow management and propose architectures and techniques for improving workflow efficiency under Internet latency. More specifically, we explore new prefetching and proactive strategies for efficient workflow distribution and evaluate and compare their performance against the passive strategy found in the HTTP protocol. Our research results show that it is possible to improve performance considerably by means of these techniques especially for low-speed connections and mobile clients. The Proceedings of the 7 Workshop on Information Technology and Systems, Atlanta, December 13-14, 1997