OPENflow: A CORBA based transactional workflow system

The paper describes an application composition and execution environment im plemented as a transactional workflow system that enables sets of inter-rel ated tasks to be carried out and supervised in a dependable manner. The pap er describes how the system meets the requirements of interoperability, sca lability, flexible task composition, dependability and dynamic reconfigurat ion. The system is general purpose and open: it has been designed and imple mented as a set of CORBA services. The system serves as an example of the u se of middleware technologies to provide a fault-tolerant execution environ ment for long running distributed applications.