The Case for a Simplified Workflow Model in Federations of Universities

We are witnessing the birth of "Federations of Universities", where many universities (especially across European Union but not only) are sharing their resources in order to provide a global integrated learning environment for their students. Students are enrolled in one department in one university, but they can attend classes, or even whole semesters in other departments or even other universities, possible from different countries. The traditional solution to solve this problem is based on the Workflow Management System, that can be used to define and automate the required flow of activities and documents. However, the effectiveness of the current approaches is limited due to their failure to address several needs inherent in such federations. We identified the following requirements that such an architecture has to offer support for: (i) the easiness of use and deploy, (ii) the ability of a student to maintain a global state across the different universities and (iii) a distributed enforcement mechanism, without a centralized component. In this paper we present a flexible, yet robust framework that will allow the deployment of intra and inter-universities workflow-like systems. In our system, the interactions of the agents that work in a given community are governed by a given law that is enforced in a distributed manner. The implementation will employ the distributed coordination and control mechanism called Law-Governed Interaction (LGI).