The Dependency Manager: a base service for transactional workflow management

The management of long lived applications is a great challenge to transaction processing systems. On the other side, workflow management systems (WFMS) provide mechanisms for basic navigation and synchronization of activities in workflows. However, WFMS do not allow reliable execution of transactional workflows since they have no provisions for activity coordination. We introduce the dependency manager (DM) which implements a mechanism for reliable synchronization and coordination of the state transitions of generic activities. The DM is designed as a new component of an extended X/Open architecture, which offers its services to both workflow management and transaction processing systems.