CORBA-Based Run Time Architectures for Workflow Management Systems

This article presents five run-time architectures for implementing a Workflow Management System (WFMS). The architectures range from highly centralized to fully distributed. Two of the architectures have been implemented at the Large Scale Distributed Information Systems (LSDIS) Lab at The University of Georgia. All the WFMS architectures are designed on top of a Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) implementation. The article also discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the architectures and the suitability of CORBA as a communication infrastructure. A minor extension to CORBA’s Interface Definition Language (IDL) is proposed to provide an alternative means of specifying workflows. Simplified examples from the healthcare domain are given to illustrate our workflow technology.