A Web-based transactional workflow monitoring system

This paper describes a monitoring system supervising transactional workflow activities in Web-based environments. There have been prevalent research and development trends in the workflow literature-workflow systems tend to be completely distributed architectures to support very large-scale workflow applications on object-oriented and Internet-based infrastructures. That is, the active (object), distributed (architecture), system-oriented (transaction), and large-scale (application) workflow systems are the key targets in terms of the research and development aspects. While the passive, centralized, human-oriented, and small/medium scale workflow systems are the typical instances of the traditional workflow systems. Unlike in the traditional (the client-server architecture) workflow systems, the workflow monitoring features cannot be easily supported in the recent (the fully distributed architecture) workflow systems. At the same time, they need a set of additional monitoring features, such as gathering and displaying statistical (or overload status) information of the workflow architectural components dispersed on the Internet. The paper introduces the additional workflow monitoring features that are necessarily required for the recent workflow systems, and shows how to embed those features into a transactional workflow system with Web-based operational environments