A coordination system approach to software workflow process evolution

Describes a coordination-based approach to the dynamic evolution of (software) workflow processes. Our interest is in widely distributed workflow processes, i.e. systems that allow each instance of a process model to be enacted in a distributed fashion, with different parts of the process being enacted on different nodes of the system. More specifically, we are interested in the problem of dynamic workflow process evolution in such a distributed context, where the propagation of changes to all the concerned nodes has to be performed in an orderly manner. We address the problem of dynamic workflow process evolution from a coordination system approach, considering the workflow system as a coordination system and the workflow evolution as a coordinated evolution of the coordination schemes. We illustrate the problem of workflow evolution in a software engineering context, and describe a method using the reflexive features of our underlying coordination system to support dynamic workflow process evolution in a distributed workflow system