Run-time Adaptable Business Process Decentralization

BPEL specified business processes in the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are executed by non-scalable centralized orchestration engines. In order to resolve scalability issues, the centralized engines are clustered, which is not a final solution either. Alternatively, several decentralized orchestration engines are being emerged with the purpose of decentralizing a BPEL process into fragments, statically. Fully decentralization of a process into its building activities is an example of static fragmentation methods. The fragments are then encapsulated into run-time components such as agents. There are a number of attitudes towards workflow decentralization; however, only a few of them consider the adaptability of produced fragments with a run-time environment. The run-time adaptability can be studied from different aspects such as the proportionality of workflow fragments with number of machines dedicated to a workflow engine or runtime circumstances such as available bandwidth. In our opinion, the SOA suffers from the lack of decentralization adaptability with run-time environments in the orchestration layer. It demands the mapping of run-time circumstances to a suitable fragmentation model. In this paper, a mapping algorithm is presented, which is based on the number of machines and available bandwidth. Evaluation of the presented algorithm for adaptable decentralization demonstrates an improvement of the bandwidth usage compared to a fully decentralized process. Keywords-Adaptive Systems; Service Oriented Architecture; Distributed Orchestrate Engine; Self-* Systems; BPEL; Mobile Agents; processes from different parties all together naturally result in creating thousands of concurrent executing instances. Such number of concurrent requests is a natural fit to this paper. In addition, new software paradigms introduced in the Cloud computing such as software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are targeted to receive a huge number of requests. Particularly, in the case of orchestrate engine as a service, a huge number of workflow instances might be deployed and requested from various clients all around the world. In order to handle the requests, different number of machines and also resources must be employed. This paper proposes an adaptable and distributed workflow engine, which tackles

[1]  Fabio Bellifemine,et al.  Developing Multi-Agent Systems with JADE (Wiley Series in Agent Technology) , 2007 .

[2]  Frank Leymann,et al.  Model and infrastructure for decentralized workflow enactment , 2008, SAC '08.

[3]  Wei Tan,et al.  Dynamic workflow model fragmentation for distributed execution , 2007, Comput. Ind..

[4]  Luciano Baresi,et al.  Toward Open-World Software: Issue and Challenges , 2006, Computer.

[5]  Hans-Arno Jacobsen,et al.  SLA-driven business process management in SOA , 2007, CASCON.

[6]  Masrah Azrifah Azmi Murad,et al.  Business process distribution: an intelligent approach. , 2008 .

[7]  Giancarlo Fortino,et al.  Distributed Workflow Enactment: an Agent-based Framework , 2006, WOA.

[8]  Nur Izura Udzir,et al.  Adaptable Decentralized Service Oriented Architecture , 2011, J. Syst. Softw..

[9]  David Stuart Robertson,et al.  A novel approach for enacting the distributed business workflows using BPEL4WS on the multi-agent platform , 2005, IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering (ICEBE'05).

[10]  Peter A. Gloor,et al.  DartFlow: A Workflow Management System on the Web using Transportable Agents , 1996 .

[11]  Hans-Arno Jacobsen,et al.  A distributed service-oriented architecture for business process execution , 2010, TWEB.

[12]  Vijayalakshmi Atluri,et al.  A decentralized execution model for inter-organizational workflows , 2007, Distributed and Parallel Databases.

[13]  Agostino Poggi,et al.  Jade - a fipa-compliant agent framework , 1999 .

[14]  Nur Izura Udzir,et al.  Using process mining to business process distribution , 2009, SAC '09.

[15]  Vivek Sarkar,et al.  Decentralizing execution of composite web services , 2004, OOPSLA.

[16]  Frank Leymann,et al.  E Role-based Decomposition of Business Processes using BPEL , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS'06).

[17]  Jacques Wainer,et al.  A Fully Distributed Architecture for Large Scale Workflow Enactment , 2003, Int. J. Cooperative Inf. Syst..

[18]  Giovanni Caire,et al.  WADE: a software platform to develop mission critical applications exploiting agents and workflows , 2008, AAMAS.

[19]  Pawel Kaczmarek,et al.  Efficiency of JADE agent platform , 2005, Sci. Program..

[20]  Nur Izura Udzir,et al.  SLA-Driven Business Process Distribution , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Information, Process, and Knowledge Management.

[21]  Agostino Poggi,et al.  Developing Multi-agent Systems with JADE , 2007, ATAL.

[22]  Nur Izura Udzir,et al.  A Case Study of The Intelligent Process Decentralization Method , 2009 .

[23]  Marijn Janssen,et al.  Enabling flexible processes by ECA orchestration architecture , 2009, ICEGOV '09.

[24]  Alessandro Ricci,et al.  Engineering a BPEL orchestration engine as a multi-agent system , 2007, Sci. Comput. Program..