Synthesizing distributed constrained events from transactional workflow specifications

Workflows are the semantically appropriate composite activities in heterogeneous computing environments. Such environments typically comprise a great diversity of locally autonomous databases, applications and interfaces. Much good research has focused on the semantics of workflows and how to capture them in different extended transaction models. We address the complementary issues pertaining to how workflows may be declaratively specified and how distributed constraints may be derived from those specifications to enable local control, thus obviating a centralized scheduler. Previous approaches to this problem were limited and often lacked a formal semantics.