An Overview of the Exotica Research Project on Workflow Management Systems

this paper, we present the Exotica research project currently in progress at the IBM Almaden Research Center. One of the goals of the project is to bring together industrial trends and research issues in the workflow area. It is for this reason that we have focused on a particular commercial product, FlowMark, IBM's workflow product [15, 16, 19, 20]. However, our results are easily generalized to other WFMSs since FlowMark's model is similar to that proposed by the Workflow Management Coalition [13]. In particular, the rest of this paper contains a high-level overview of our research in six specific areas that are not product specific. The list of these areas is not, by any means, exhaustive. There are still many issues that remain open. We also discuss the relationship between WFMSs and transaction processing monitors