Pervasive Workflows: Architecture, Reliability and Security

Electronic commerce applications have become the standard support for B2B and B2C collaborations. The concept of workflow has been the main enabler concept for such applications. Workflow technologies indeed make it possible to leverage the functionalities of multiple service providers to build value-added services. Typical workflows however rely on a centralized coordinator in charge of managing the workflow execution. New trends in collaborative business applications however call for more flexibility. As a result, the centralized coordination paradigm is no longer suitable to adequately support the execution of recent business applications. In this book we present a decentralized workflow management system to overcome this limitation. The main contribution of this book is the design and implementation of a full-fledged distributed workflow management system. The workflow architecture that we developed supports the execution of workflows in environments whereby resources offered by each partner can be used by any party within the surroundings of that partner.