Workflow Management Systems in Distributed Environments

Abstract

With the advent of Service Oriented Architectures, more applications are built in a distributed manner based on loose coupled services. In this context, Workflow Management Systems play an important role as they are the means to both define the processes that realize the application goals as well as implement the orchestration of the different services. The purpose of the chapter is to give an overview of various solutions regarding workflow semantics and languages, as well as their enactment within the scope of distributed systems. To this end, major focus is given to solutions that are aimed at Grid environments. Scheduling algorithms and advance reservation techniques are also discussed as these are among the hottest research topics in Workflow Management Systems.