MANAGING HETEROGENEOUS MULTISYSTEM TASKS TO SUPPORT ENTERPRISE-WIDE OPERATIONS

The computing environment in most medium-sized and large enterprises i nvolves old main-frame based (legacy) applications and systems as well as new workstation-based distributed computing systems. The objective of the METEOR project is to support multi-system workflow application s that automate enterprise operations. This paper deals with the model ing and specification of workflows in such applications. Tasks in our heterogeneous environment can be submitted through different types of interfaces on different processing entities. We first present a comput ational model for workflows that captures the behavior of both transac tional and non-transactional tasks of different types. We then develop two languages for specifying a workflow at different levels of abstra ction: the Workflow Specification Language (WFSL) is a declarative rul e-based language used to express the application-level interactions be tween multiple tasks, while the Task Specification Language (TSL) focu ses on the issues related to individual tasks. These languages are des igned to address the important issues of inter-task dependencies, data formating, data exchange, error handling, and recovery. The paper als o presents an architecture for the workflow management system that sup ports the model and the languages.