Workflow Management and Modeling in METEOR:
The WebWork Enactment Service

This work involves the design and prototype implementation of Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) as well as issues involved in the modeling of workflows. WFMSs coordinate, control, monitor workflows consisting of automated/semi-automated tasks and the information flowing between them. Our project addresses several open issues: transactional workflows, interoperability via CORBA and/or Java, familiar easy-to-use interfaces (Web browsers), multiple WfMS architectures, an easy-to-use graphical design tool, application to the healthcare domain, and multi-paradigm workflows.

WebWork is a purely Web-based WfMS Enactment Service developed by the University of Georgia's LSDIS Lab (Sheth, Miller, Kochut and students). It is part of the METEOR project whose purpose is to develop multi-enterprise workflows supporting transactional subworkflows. WebWork creates workflow applications from designs created using the METEOR Designer (MTD) . Other components of the METEOR project include OrbWork (a CORBA-based complement to WebWork) and METEOR Repository (MTR). See the LSDIS Library for futher information.

Bioinformatics Applications

Publications

  1. John A. Miller, Amit P. Sheth, Krys J. Kochut and ZongWei Luo, "Recovery Issues in Web-Based Workflow," Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer Applications in Industry and Engineering (CAINE-99), Atlanta, Georgia (November 1999) pp. 101-105.
    Long Version (Postscript)

  2. David Hall, John A. Miller, Jonathan Arnold, Krys J. Kochut, Amit P. Sheth and Michael Weise, "Using Workflow to Build an Information Management System for a Geographically Distributed Genome Sequencing Initiative," Bioinformatics Journal (BIO), Vol. (1999) pp. (submitted) Oxford University Press.

  3. John A. Miller, Mei Fan, Shengli Wu, Ismailcem B. Arpinar, Amit P. Sheth and Krys J. Kochut, "Security for the METEOR Workflow Management System," UGA-CS-LSDIS Technical Report, University of Georgia (June 1999) 33 pages.
    Prototype Implementation: Javadoc Documentation .

  4. ZongWei Luo, Amit P. Sheth, Krys J. Kochut and John A. Miller, "Exception Handling in Workflow Systems," Artificial Intelligence: An International Journal (AI) Vol. (1999) pp. (to appear)

  5. Kemafor Anyanwu, Amit P. Sheth, John A. Miller, Krys J. Kochut and Ketan Bhukhanwala, "Healthcare Enterprise Process Development and Integration," Journal of Systems Integration Vol. (1999) pp. (to appear)

  6. Myong H. Kang, Judith N. Froscher, Amit P. Sheth, Krys J. Kochut and John A. Miller, "A Multilevel Secure Workflow Management System," Proceedings of the 11th Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'99), Heidelberg, Germany (June 1999) pp. 271-285.

  7. Krys J. Kochut, Amit P. Sheth, John A. Miller, "Optimizing Workflow," Component Strategies, Vol. 1, No. 9 (March 1999) pp. 45-57.

  8. Zongwei Luo, Amit P. Sheth, John A. Miller and Krys J. Kochut, "Defeasible Workflow, its Computation and Exception Handling," Online Proceedings of the 1998 Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Workshop (CSCW-98): Towards Adaptive Workflow Systems, Seattle, Washington (November 1998).

  9. John A. Miller, Devanand Palaniswami, Amit P. Sheth, Krys J. Kochut and Harvinder Singh, "WebWork: METEOR2's Web-Based Workflow Management System," Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, Special Issue on Workflow Management Systems, Vol. 10, No. 2 (March/April 1998) pp. 185-215. Kluwer Academic Publishers.

  10. Amit P. Sheth, Devashish Worah, Krys J. Kochut, John A. Miller, Ke Zheng, Devanand Palaniswami, Souvik Das, "The METEOR Workflow Management System and Its Use in Prototyping Significant Healthcare Applications," Proceedings of the Towards An Electronic Patient Record (TEPR'97) Conference, Nashville, Tennessee (April-May 1997) pp. 267-278.

  11. Amit P. Sheth, Krys J. Kochut, John A. Miller, Devashish Worah, Souvik Das, Chenye Lin, Devanand Palaniswami, John Lynch and Ivan Shevchenko, "Supporting State-wide Immunization Tracking using Multi-Paradigm Workflow Technology," Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB'96), India (September 1996) pp. 263-273.

  12. John A. Miller, Amit P. Sheth, Krys J. Kochut and Xuzhong Wang, "CORBA-Based Run-Time Architectures for Workflow Management Systems," Journal of Database Management, Special Issue on Multidatabases, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Winter 1996) pp. 16-27. Idea Group Publishing.

  13. John A. Miller, Amit P. Sheth, Krys J. Kochut, Xuzhong Wang and Arun Murugan, "Simulation Modeling Within Workflow Technology," Proceedings of the 1995 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC'95), Arlington, Virginia (December 1995) pp. 612-619.

Theses

  1. Mei Fan, "Security for the METEOR Workflow Management System," Masters Thesis (M.S. in CS Degree) April 1999.

  2. Weixiong (Simon) Xu, "NEOWork: A Reliable CORBA-Based Workflow Enactment System for METEOR2," Masters Thesis (M.S. in CS Degree) September 1997.

  3. Devanand Palaniswami, "Development of WebWork: METEOR2's Web-based Workflow Management System," Masters Thesis (M.S. in CS Degree) June 1997.

  4. Xuzhong Wang, "Implementation and Performance Evaluation of CORBA-Based Centralized Workflow Schedulers," Masters Thesis (M.S. in CS Degree) August 1995.

Introductory WebWork Documentation

For more detailed documentation see Infocosm .

Run Example Workflow Applications

This research was partially done under a cooperative agreement between the National Institute of Standards and Technology Advanced Technology Program (under the HIIT contract, number 70NANB5H1011) and the Healthcare Open System and Trials, Inc. consortium. See URL: http://www.scra.org/hiit.html . Additional partial support and donations are provided by Visigenic, Informix, Iona, Hewlett-Packard Labs, and Boeing.