Managing Heterogeneous Multi-system Tasks to Support Enterprise-wide Operations

. The computing environment in most medium-sized and large enterprises involves old main-frame based (legacy) applications and systems as well as new workstation-based distributed computing systems. The objective of the METEOR project is to support multi-system workflow applications that automate enterprise operations. This paper deals with the modeling and specification of workflows in such applications. Tasks in our heterogeneous environment can be submitted through different types of interfaces on different processing entities. We first present a computational model for workflows that captures the behavior of both transactional and nontransactional tasks of different types. We then develop two languages for specifying a workflow at different levels of abstraction: the Workflow Specification Language (WFSL) is a declarative rulebased language used to express the application-level interactions between multiple tasks, while the Task Specification Language (TSL) focuses on the issues re..