The MARIFlow Workflow Management System

Abstract

MARIFlow System [1] provides for automating and monitoring the flow of control and data over the Internet among different organizations, thereby creating a platform necessary to describe higher order processes involving several organizations and companies. The architecture is general enough to be applied to any business practice where data flow among different industries and cooperations and the invocation of activities follow a pattern that can be described through a process definition. The example application provided within the scope of this project is on maritime industry A MARIFlow process is executed through cooperating agents, called MARCAs (MARIFlow Cooperating Agents) that are automatically initialized at each site that the process executes. MARCAs handle the activities at their site, provide for coordination with other MARCAs in the system by routing the documents in electronic form according to the process description, keeping track of process information, and providing for the security and authentication of documents as well as comprehensive monitoring facilities. More specifically, the functionality provided by the system is as follows: ¯ A declarative means to specify the control of document flow over the Internet where it is possible to define the source of data, its control flow and the activities that make use of this data. ¯ A fully distributed execution architecture achieved through cooperating agents over the Internet. The agents know about other agents that they need to communicate with and preserve their state during communication. They also manage local information for monitoring purposes and for recovering from failures. ¯ Communicating with inside firewall applications. A MARCA can activate in-house activities automati