Implementing robust workflow management in Erlang

Workflow management systems are software systems that model and execute the logic of business processes. There are many approaches for modelling process workflows and many systems or ‘engines’ for executing such models. One goal of workflow design is robustness , which, in general, means resistance to software or hardware errors, and the ability to recover the execution of the workflow process from such errors, in a graceful manner. In this paper, we propose an architecture and implementation for robust workflow management systems, using the Erlang language. We first show how common workflow design patterns such as sequence , split and join can be implemented in Erlang, and then how robustness supporting mechanisms such as workflow monitors can be added. We illustrate the approach by showing how a business workflow described in Business Process Model and Notation BPMN can be implemented according to the above approach, and demonstrate its failure handling capabilities.