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The advent of web services brings new promises for organizations that collaborate amongst themselves through interorganizational workflow (IOW) management systems by providing a standard platform for interorganizational information exchange. However, a major impediment to more wide-scale use of such systems is the lack of provably correct methods for managing fault tolerance. The objective of our research is to provide a checkpointing scheme as the foundation for a sound recovery strategy for IOWs: a strategy that can be included in higher-level web services standards. We adopt concepts from the mobile computing literature to decompose workflows into mobile agent-driven processes that will prospectively attach to web services-based organizational 'docking stations.' This decomposition is extended in order to define logical points within the dynamics of the entire workflow execution that provide for …