Model and infrastructure for decentralized workflow enactment

Abstract

Today, enactment of Web service flows -the process of evaluating control flow and executing activities a workflow is composed of -is typically done by a centralized workflow enactment service as part of a Workflow management system. This exhibits a number of drawbacks with regard to process adaptability and process fragmentation among a number of participating partners. In order to overcome the deficiencies of centralized process navigation, we propose a model for flexible and adaptable distributed processes as orchestrations of a set of self-coordinating components, without the need for central coordination. Furthermore, we provide key characteristics and an architecture for the development of a supporting infrastructure that facilitates both, deployment and management of distributed components as well as decentralized workflow enactment.

Always Stay Flexible! WfMS-independent Business Process Controlling in SOA

“…[17], [20], [21], might use our results. In turn such approaches might be useful for certain aspects in our research as well, e.g.…”

“…In [17], [18] a decentralized WfMS model and infrastructure is discussed. Our novel WfMS independent business process monitoring architecture could be a useful enhancement for such approaches.…”

Decentralized Data Flows in Algebraic Service Compositions for the Scalability of IoT Systems

“…Only few approaches discuss data decentralization using the semantics of decentralized orchestration. [11] stores data and control in distributed tuple spaces which may become a bottleneck in IoT environments that continuously generate huge amount of data. [3] solves that issue by storing references instead of values.…”

Synchronizing control flow in a tuplespace-based, distributed workflow management system

“…In contrast to this, an approach presented in previous work [19] allows for distributed execution of coordination logic (i.e. the distributed evaluation of process control flow) among the individual services participating in a workflow.…”

“…In the distributed workflow model proposed in [19], a highlevel process definition (WS-BPEL [2] or BPEL for short) is transformed into a set of services which communicate by storing tuples to and consuming tuples from distributed, remote-accessible tuplespaces that are identified with a URI (similar to a resource on the Web). In contrast to centralized workflow enactment, where a navigator evaluates the current state of a process instance to trigger activity execution, process control flow is realized in the distributed model by passing control flow tokens between adjacent activities through tuplespaces.…”