Article in Proceedings INPROC-2008-107

BibliographyMartin, Daniel; Wutke, Daniel; Leymann, Frank: A Novel Approach to Decentralized Workflow Enactment.
In: Proceedings of the 12th International IEEE Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC 2008). Munich, Germany, September 15 - 19, 2008..
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology.
pp. 127-136, english.
IEEE Computer Society, September 2008.
ISBN: 978-0-7695-3373-5.
Article in Proceedings (Conference Paper).
CR-SchemaH.4.1 (Office Automation)
Keywordstuplespace; petri nets; workflow; bpel; linda; coordination
Abstract

Web service orchestrations -- expressed in the Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL or BPEL for short) -- are a manifestation of the two-level-programming paradigm where services, i.e. the business functions used by the composite application, are composed through BPEL's control flow constructs. BPEL processes Web service orchestrations, business functions therefore can be transparently accessed remotely, allowing to build composite applications that integrate business functions provided by different partners on different locations. As of today, execution of BPEL processes, i.e. the evaluation of the processes' control flow, is performed by a central workflow engine. In certain scenarios, such as complex collaborative cross-partner interactions, this approach of centralized workflow enactment leads to ``un-natural'' process models; process models that are not driven by the processes' original business goal but by infrastructural or organizational reasons. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to enacting BPEL process control flow in a distributed, decentralized manner. We present the overall process lifecycle and give a detailed description of the underlying process model.

Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Architecture of Application Systems
Project(s)TripCom
Entry dateDecember 24, 2008
   Publ. Computer Science