History Management in Work ow Systems

A workkow history manager maintains the information essential for workkow monitoring and data mining as well as for recovery and authorization purposes. Certain characteristics of workkow systems like the necessity to run these systems on heterogeneous, autonomous and distributed environments and the nature of data, prevent history management in workkows to be handled by the classical data management techniques like distributed DBMSs. In this paper, we describe history management, i.e., the structure of the history and querying of the history, in a fully distributed workkow architecture realized in conformance with Object Management Architecture (OMA) of OMG. We describe the structure of the history objects determined according to the nature of the data and the processing needs, and the possible query processing strategies on these objects using the Object Query Service of OMG. We then introduce a cost model and discuss the optimization issues in this environment.