Providing high availability in very large workflow management systems

Kamath, M.; Alonso, Gustavo; Günthör, Roger; Mohan, C.

doi:10.1007/bfb0014169

Cited by 40 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Even though some WfMSs currently offer time management support, the technology available is rudimentary (Eder, Panagos et al 1999). Research on workflow reliability issues has also been conducted, but the work was mostly on system implementation (Kamath, Alonso et al 1996;Tang and Veijalainen 1999;Wheater and Shrivastava 2000). The Crossflow project (Klingemann, Wäsch et al 1999;Damen, Derks et al 2000;Grefen, Aberer et al 2000) is the one that most closely relates to our work.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quality of service for workflows and web service processes

Cardoso

Sheth

Miller

et al. 2004

Journal of Web Semantics

740

288

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Workflow management systems (WfMSs) have been used to support various types of business processes for more than a decade now. In workflows for e-commerce and Web-services applications, suppliers and customers define a binding agreement or contract between the two parties, specifying Quality of Service (QoS) items such as products or services to be delivered, deadlines, quality of products, and cost of services. The management of QoS metrics directly impacts the success of organizations participating in e-commerce. Therefore, when services or products are created or managed using workflows, the underlying workflow system must accept the specifications and be able to estimate, monitor, and control the QoS rendered to customers. In this paper, we present a predictive QoS model that makes it possible to compute the quality of service for workflows automatically based on atomic task QoS attributes. To this end, we present a model that specifies QoS and describe an algorithm and a simulation system in order to compute, analyze and monitor workflow QoS metrics.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quality of service for workflows and web service processes

Cardoso

Sheth

Miller

et al. 2004

Journal of Web Semantics

740

288

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…. . , I n may be very large; in environments like hospitals or telecommunication companies, for example, n > 10.000 may easily hold [16,57].…”

Section: Challenges Of Process Schema Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Then the challenging question is how to ensure this criterion efficiently. This is especially important for large-scale environments with hundreds up to thousands of running process instances [57]. The question behind is somewhat comparable to serializability of database transactions (correctness criterion).…”

Section: Correctnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Figure 4.1). In large-scale environments hundreds up to thousands of such unbiased instances with same process type, being in different execution states, may be concurrently running [57]. Therefore it is crucial to efficiently decide on whether a process type change can be correctly propagated to unbiased process instances or not.…”

Section: Migrating Unbiased Process Instancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…, I m are compliant with S or not. The challenging question we want to answer in this section is how to ensure this criterion for a possibly large number of running process instances (for example in a medical environment or the financial sector m > 10.000 may easily hold [57]). At first glance, an obvious solution is to replay the execution histories of all running process instances on the changed process type schema and -if this is possible -to check afterwards whether the resulting instance marking is consistent (cf.…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Schema Evolution in Process Management Systems

SpringerReference

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Continuously arising new trends in information technology and developments at the (e-business) market let companies crave for automated business process support. Process management systems offer the promising possibility to (electronically) define, control, and monitor business processes. However, if this technology shall be applicable in practice it must be possible to change running business processes even at runtime. Basically, such process changes can take place at two levels -the process type level and the process instance level. If a process type is modified a new version of the respective process type schema is created. Then, at minimum, the process instances running according to the old process type schema version must be able to finish without being disturbed. However, this simple versioning approach is only sufficient for short-running business processes. For long-running ones like, for example, car leasing contracts or medical treatment processes which may last from 3 up to 5 years, it must be possible to apply the process type changes to the collection of running process instances as well but without causing inconsistencies or errors in the sequel. Apart from process schema evolution and change propagation a flexible process management system must also enable instance-specific (ad-hoc) changes, for example, if exceptional situations occur. If then a process type change takes place the challenging question arises how to adequately deal with the interplay of process type and process instance changes.

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Benchmarking and Configuration of Workflow Management Systems

Gillmann

Mindermann

Weikum

2000

Cooperative Information Systems

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Workflow management systems (WFMS) are a cornerstone of mission-criticial, possibly cross-organizational business processes. For largescale applications both their performance and availability are crucial factors, and the system needs to be properly configured to meet the application demands. Despite ample work on scalable system architectures for workflow management, the literature has neglected the important issues of how to systematically measure the performance of a given system configuration and how to determine viable configurations without resorting to expensive trial-anderror or guesswork. This paper proposes a synthetic benchmark for workflow management systems; based on the TPC-C order-entry benchmark, a complete e-commerce workflow is specified in a system-independent form. This workflow benchmark, which stresses all major components of a workflow system and is parameterized in a flexible manner, has been applied to two operational systems, the commercial system Staffware97 and our own prototype system Mentor-lite. The paper reports performance results from our measurements and discusses lessons learned. In particular, the results demonstrate the scalability of the Mentor-lite architecture. The measurements also underline the need for configuring systems intelligently, and the paper outlines an auto-configuration tool that we have been building to this end. 1 Introduction 1.1 Problem Statement Workflow technology has penetrated into mission-critical, enterprise-wide or even crossorganizational, business applications. Typical examples are insurance claim processing, cargo shipping, or healt-care tracking and planning, and workflow technology is also embedded in many e-commerce services. Following the terminology of WfMC [32] (see also [5, 6, 8, 15, 18]), a workflow is a set of activities that belong together in order to achieve a certain business goal. Activities can be completely automated or based on interaction with a human user and intellectual decision-making. In particular, an activity can spawn requests to an arbitrary "invoked application" that is provided by some server independently of the current workflow. Workflow management systems (WFMS) orchestrate the control and data flow between a workflow's activities, based on a high-level specification of the intended behavior (e.g., using Petri-net variants, state charts, or some script language) with some leeway for exception handling and run-time improvisation (as needed, e.g., in medical applications). Despite their business success, most WFMS products exhibit specific idiosyncracies and, by and large, significant deficiencies and limitations in terms of their performance. The current situation is probably comparable to that of relational database systems in the eighties. Also and similarly to database technology, configuring and tuning a WFMS for satisfactory performance falls more in the realm of black art (i.e., guesswork or expensive trial-and-error experimentation) and sorely lacks scientific foundations. Even such mundane basics such as sy...

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Providing high availability in very large workflow management systems

Cited by 40 publications

References 6 publications

Quality of service for workflows and web service processes

Quality of service for workflows and web service processes

Schema Evolution in Process Management Systems

Benchmarking and Configuration of Workflow Management Systems

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