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...

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