Management of work sessions in dynamic open environments

Workflow management systems are developed to support and automate the execution of business processes, by assigning tasks to agents according to the workflow specification. Current state-of-the-art workflow systems are mainly concerned with the routing and assignment of tasks, providing little support for tasks related to administration and management. This deficiency is exacerbated in dynamic open environments, where services provided and managed by multiple autonomous authorities need to be integrated. Such environments significantly stretch the assumptions underlying current state-of-the-art workflow system designs, especially as network-centric applications become widespread. We propose a framework, service level management, for addressing all system administration in an integrated manner in the context of a workflow execution model that allows for dynamic adaptation (reconfiguration) of work sessions in a dynamic and heterogeneous run-time environment. Service level management requires a comprehensive monitoring infrastructure. We present our design for such an infrastructure, which is part of our current work towards developing the Aurora architecture for supporting work sessions.