realtime workflow

The day before yesterday, on a meeting,  professer Liu asked about the the responds performace of our workflow system --dme. He metioned the questoin :  is there  a request of realtime in a common workflow system envioment?  And he  thought it will be in most situation. His  point  is that the workflow system originally came from the request of craftwork process, and a non-trivial craftwork process almost alway have to pay attention to the respond time problem. I think it reasonable. Perhaps because what we found and what we saw was all concerned in the informize of enterprises,  and this perhaps might be a most easy part of the domain study, we just ignored more real things. What about a work process in real world? Not the payment raising process but a car's production flow or missle's lanch process?

I really haven't study the j2ee specification too much, and have no evidence about that a j2ee system can  meet the request of a realtime workflow or not. But, from my instinct, it will not-- look at the performace of EJBs!  if i have time, i will go to see whether using a ace-tao corba c++ solution can deal everything