CodAlf: a decentralized workflow management system on top of OSF DCE and DC++

Describes a new workflow management system (WfMS) named CodAlf ("Code-name Alfa"). It is based on a completely decentralized system architecture. The approach especially enables the support of distributed organizations as well as dynamic growth and reconfiguration. CodAlf supports collaborative work and decentralization with the help of a comfortable type management. The implementation uses the OSF Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) as a basis. All components are modeled and implemented as objects of a distributed system on top of DC++, an object-oriented extension of DCE. In addition to runtime support, a workflow specification language and a workflow design tool are offered. The system is also compared to commercially-available WfMSs and to decentralized object-oriented approaches.