The Mentor Project: Steps Toward Enterprise-Wide Workflow Management

A workflow is the coordinated execution of a collection of computer–supported activities which are run under the responsibility of different, human or automated processing entities. Enterprise– wide workflow management where workflows may span multiple organizational units require particular consideration of scalability, heterogeneity, and availability issues; research in this direction is still in its infancy. 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. These are well–known in the area of reactive systems, but we are not aware of a prior use for workflow management. 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.