Key Issues and Experiences in Development of Distributed Workflow Management Systems

Research on workflow technology has been promoting the development of workflow management systems (WfMSs). Compared to centralised WfMSs, the development of distributed WfMSs are much more complex. Therefore, it needs to analyse their development from the software engineering perspective. This paper first presents the development lifecycle of distributed WfMSs, and then discusses issues of enterprise-wide workflow modeling and implementation of distributed WfMSs. Furthermore, we report on a case study and discuss issues related to the implementation of some components.