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Design for Change: Evolving Workflow Specifications in
ULTRAflow
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Design for Change: Evolving Workflow Specifications in ULTRAflow
Alfred Fent7  , Herbert Reiter7 and Burkhard Freitag7
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Department of Computer Science, University of Passau, 94030 Passau, Germany |
Abstract
Updating the specification of workflows on the fly in a workflow management system is currently considered an important topic
in research as well as application. Yet, most approaches are either very simplistic, allowing only newly started workflows
to take advantage of updated specifications, or they are complex, trying to transfer every active workflow from the old to
the new schema.
In the workflow management system ULTRAflow, updates to workflow specifications are handled by using a multi-version concurrency
control protocol. This is facilitated by the specification language for workflows, which is rule based and therefore provides
a natural partitioning of specifications into smaller units. The proposed method allows active, running workflows to partly
use new specifications if this does not conflict with already executed sub-workflows. Moreover, an architecture which is also
applicable in a distributed system is presented.
While the method to update the specifications is discussed in the context of a workflow management system, it can also be
applied in CORBA or EJB applications, or the now ubiquitous electronic services.
The work described in this paper has been funded by the German Research Agency (DFG) under contract number Fr 1021/3-3.
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