DartFlow: A Workflow Management System on the Web using Transportable Agents

Abstract

Workflow management systems help streamline business processes and increase productivity. This paper describes the design and implementation of the DartFlow workflow management system. DartFlow uses Web-browser embedded Java applets as its front end and transportable agents as the backbone. While Java applets provide a safe and platform independent GUI, the use of transportable agents makes DartFlow highly flexible and scalable. This paper describes the design and implementation of DartFlow, as well as a workflow application that exploits DartFlow's agent-based design. 1. Introduction Rising costs, international competition, and rapidly changing boundary conditions require fast and flexible adaptation to a quickly evolving business environment. While earlier improvement efforts left the internal business organization intact, business process reengineering (BPR) [Ham92] places its whole emphasis on rebuilding the corporation. As enabling technology for BPR, workflow management has exper...