The main challenge in WADE is to bring the workflow approach from the business process level to the level of system internal logics. That is, even if it could be used for that purpose too, WADE does not target high level orchestration of services provided by different systems, but the implementation of the internal behaviour of each single system.

A direct consequence of the described approach is that WADE is expected to be particularly suitable for applications that imply the execution of possibly long and fairly complex tasks.

Furthermore, unlike the majority of existing workflow systems that provide a powerful centralized engine, in WADE each agent can embed a “micro workflow engine” and a complex process can be carried out by a set of cooperating agents each one executing a piece of the process.  

From an industrial point of view one advantage in using WADE is the possibility to develop mission critical applications that can work on grid of blade servers (or PC) with great scalability, and big savings in hardware.

WADE is distributed by Telecom Italia, the copyright holder, in open source software under the terms of the LGPL ( Lesser General Public License Version 2). Since May 2008. 

The latest version of WADE is Wade 3.0 released on 13/07/2011.