Workflow management systems on top of OSF DCE and OMG CORBA

This paper describes a new workflow management approach and system named CodAlf. It is based on a decentralized system architecture. As compared to existing research-oriented and commercial solutions, the approach especially enables the support of distributed organizations as well as dynamic growth and reconfiguration. The implementation uses the OSF Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) as a basis. All components are modelled and implemented as objects of a distributed system on top of DC++, an object-oriented DCE extension. In addition to runtime support, a workflow specification language and a workflow design tool are offered. The system is also compared to a CORBA-based approach named BPAFrame, a very recent development within our group. Experiences with typical applications are reported.