Distributed Event-Based Process Execution - Assessing Feasibility and Flexibility

Processes modeling and execution (with a process engine) are getting more and more incorporated in todays business environments. This movement puts a lot of stress on classical process engines which have to coordinate many process instances simultaneously. Performance degrades quickly as the number of process instances increases, and a single point of failure is introduced by using a central process execution engine. In this paper, we address these challenges by providing a non-intrusive approach to distribute a process flow and have the flow executed by multiple, smaller process engines. We pay special attention to flexibility of the eventual distributed execution, since process change is costly in a distributed environment. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by providing an implementation of the transformation and execution architecture, and demonstrate the lower cost of process change that is achieved when using a flexible process runtime architecture.