An overview of workflow management: from process modeling to workflow automation infrastructure
Distributed and Parallel Databases - Special issue on software support for work flow management
From Centralized Workflow Specification to Distributed WorkflowExecution
Journal of Intelligent Information Systems - Special issue on workflow management systems
A configuration management approach for large workflow management systems
WACC '99 Proceedings of the international joint conference on Work activities coordination and collaboration
Load balancing in distributed workflow management system
Proceedings of the 2001 ACM symposium on Applied computing
Providing High Availability in Very Large Worklflow Management Systems
EDBT '96 Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Extending Database Technology: Advances in Database Technology
Design and Implementation of a Distributed Workflow Enactment Service
COOPIS '97 Proceedings of the Second IFCIS International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems
Formal Aspects of Workflow Management, Part 1: Semantics
Formal Aspects of Workflow Management, Part 1: Semantics
Using Distributed Object Middleware To Implement Scalable Workflow Management Systems
Journal of Integrated Design & Process Science
Ensuring reliability in B2B services: Fault tolerant inter-organizational workflows
Information Systems Frontiers
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As an implementation of business processes workflows are inherently distributed. Consequently, there is a considerable amount both of commercial products and research prototypes that address distribution issues in workflow execution and workflow management systems (WfMS). However, most of these approaches provide only results focussed on the properties of a specific workflow model, workflow application, and/or WfMS implementation. An analysis of generic requirements on distributed workflow execution algorithms and their applicability, advantages, and disadvantages in different workflow scenarios is still missing but will be shown in this paper. A comprehensive requirements analysis on distributed workflow execution forms the basis of our discussion of distributed workflow execution. In contrast to existing work that primarily focuses on non-functional requirements, this paper explicitly considers issues that originate in the workflow model as well. Subsequently, four basic algorithms for distributed workflow execution are presented, namely remote access, workflow migration, workflow partitioning, and subworkflow distribution. Existing WfMS approaches use combinations and/or variants of these basic algorithms. The properties of these algorithms with respect to the aforementioned requirements are discussed in detail. As a primary result, subworkflow distribution proves to be a well-suited application-independent and thus generally applicable distributed execution model. Nevertheless, application-specific optimizations can be accomplished by other models.