Workflow management — An exercise in distributed computing

Abstract

The example of what formal correctness of concurrent execution in a workflow environment could mean demonstrates at least two things: Solutions that work well in traditional settings with short-lived units of computation cannot simply be carried over to that problem domain. Second, there is no unique, general correctness criterion. It much depends on how the application perceives its data and the dependencies between them, so a practical solution may be a formal framework within which each specific application can define the type of correctness that is most appropriate. Defining such frameworks and finding ways of implementing them efficiently is one of the great challenges in workflow management technology.