Taxonomy of workflow partitioning problems and methods in distributed environments

Abstract A workflow model is the computerized representation of a business or scientific process. It defines the starting and ending conditions of the process, the activities in the process, control flow and data flow among these activities, etc. A partitioning method creates workflow fragments that group some of the workflow model elements (activities, control flows, data flows). Workflow partitioning forms the foundation of decentralised workflow execution and increases scalability, and reuse of partitions. In the literature, different methods have been presented for workflow partitioning and offer a variety of execution approaches; however, there is no existing comprehensive survey and taxonomy of workflow partitioning methods. This article presents an overview of taxonomies characterizing the key concepts of the workflow life cycle and workflow partitioning methods through a comprehensive survey of business and scientific domains in decentralised environments. This in-depth analysis of taxonomies can provide researchers, designers and applications developers with clear guideline to compare current workflow partitioning methods to choose, reuse and compose more vigorous approaches. The article further presents research discussions and future challenges in this area .