Specification of Workflows with Heterogeneous Tasks in METEOR

Many enterprise applications require performing different tasks on different systems (or processing entities). Both the types of tasks and processing entities can be very heterogeneous. Such enterprise applications can be supported by workflow automation. In this paper, we discuss specification of workflows that involve heterogeneous tasks that execute on old main-frame based (legacy) application systems as well as new workstation-based distributed computing systems. The workflow specification involves two high-level languages for specifying a workflow at different levels of abstraction: the Workflow Specification Language (WFSL) to express the application-level interactions between multiple tasks, while the Task Specification Language (TSL) focuses on the issues related to individual tasks. These languages support definition of different types of tasks, state-based and value-based intertask dependencies and data management, as well as failure and exception handlin..