Mediation Architecture for Integration of Heterogeneous Discipline Focused Workflow Languages

Workflow plays an important role in Service-Oriented Architecture, as service composition requires workflow to link services together to meet requirements from users. A number of workflows with different characteristics such as representation and logic to satisfy different demands from various problem domains (e.g. engineering, business, and scientific works) have been developed and used. However, many of these languages and their supporting enactment engines are not compatible with each other due to a lack of coherent development standards and interface protocols. An enterprise often involves multiple disciplinary software systems which need different workflow languages to model their activities, so the integration of these languages to support the integrity of enterprise tasks and activities becomes inevitable. This paper describes a new approach which allows different existing workflow languages with their supporting engines to work seamlessly together by introducing a mediation architecture which can maintain the transition states and data consistency among different workflow languages and also coordinate their execution engines. So, a workflow can be represented in different languages and carried out in a distributed environment. An example will be used to illustrate the key functions in the proposed mediating service and to demonstrate the use in a business environment.