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International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems

CoopIS 2000: Cooperative Information Systems pp 186–197Cite as

Benchmarking and Configuration of Workflow Management Systems

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1901))

Abstract

Workflow management systems (WFMS) are a cornerstone of mission-criticial, possibly cross-organizational business processes. For large-scale 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-and-error 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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of the Saarland, Germany

    Michael Gillmann, Ralf Mindermann & Gerhard Weikum

Authors
  1. Michael Gillmann
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  2. Ralf Mindermann
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  3. Gerhard Weikum
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of EECS, Northwestern Univ.,  

    Peter Scheuermann

  2. IBM Haifa Research Lab, Mount Carmel, 31905, Haifa, Israel

    Opher Etzion

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Gillmann, M., Mindermann, R., Weikum, G. (2000). Benchmarking and Configuration of Workflow Management Systems. In: Scheuermann, P., Etzion, O. (eds) Cooperative Information Systems. CoopIS 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1901. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10722620_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10722620_19

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-41021-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45266-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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