Workflow History Management in Virtual Enterprises Using a Light-Weight Workflow Management System

Enterprise-spanning workflows require workflow management systems that can be tailored to specific application needs, as well as enhanced support for interoperability between different workflow management systems. In virtual enterprises, the interoperability problem is not limited to workflow execution, but also entails facilities like worklist management and history management to be interoperable. We present a light-weight system architecture, consisting of a small system kernel on top of which extensions like history management and worklist management are implemented as workflows themselves. The functionality of the kernel such as distributed workflow execution and interoperability interfaces is available for all extensions. We show the feasibility of our approach by presenting the implementation of history management in our workflow specification language, based on state and activity charts, on top of our light-weight kernel, coined Mentor-lite.