Abstract
Workflow management systems (WFMSs) that are geared for the orchestration of enterprise-wide or even “virtual-enterprise”-style business processes across multiple organizations are complex distributed systems. They consist of multiple workflow engines, application servers, and ORB-style communication servers. Thus, deriving a suitable configuration of an entire distributed WFMS for a given application workload is a difficult task.
This paper presents a mathematically based method for configuring a distributed WFMS such that the application’s demands regarding performance and availability can be met while aiming to minimize the total system costs. The major degree of freedom that the configuration method considers is the replication of the underlying software components, workflow engines and application servers of different types as well as the communication server, on multiple computers for load partitioning and enhanced availability. The mathematical core of the method consists of Markov-chain models, derived from the application’s workflow specifications, that allow assessing the overall system’s performance, availability, and also its performability in the degraded mode when some server replicas are offline, for given degrees of replication. By iterating over the space of feasible system configurations and assessing the quality of candidate configurations, the developed method determines a configuration with near-minimum costs.
This work was performed within the research project “Architecture, Configuration, and Administration of Large Workflow Management Systems” funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
G. Alonso, D. Agrawal, A. El Abbadi, C. Mohan, Functionality and Limitations of Current Workflow Management Systems, IEEE Expert Vol.12 No. 5, 1997
T. Bauer, P. Dadam, A Distributed Execution Environment for Large-Scale Workflow Management Systems with Subnets and Server Migration, IFCIS Conf. on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS), Charleston, South Carolina, 1997
T Bauer, P. Dadam, Distribution Models for Workflow Management Systems-Classification and Simulation (in German), Technical Report, University of Ulm, Germany, 1999
A. Cichocki, A. Helal, M Rusinkiewicz, D. Woelk, Workflow and Process Automation, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998
A. Dogac, L. Kalinichenko, M. Tamer Ozsu, A. Sheth (Eds.), Workflow Management Systems and Interoperability, NATO Advanced Study Institute, Springer-Verlag, 1998
D. Georgakopoulos, M. Hornick, A. Sheth, An Overview of Workflow Management: From Process Modeling to Workflow Automation Infrastructure, Distributed and Parallel Databases Vol. 3 No. 2, 1995
M. Gillmann, P. Muth, G. Weikum, J. Weissenfels, Benchmarking of Workflow Management Systems (in German), German Conf. on Database Systems in Office, Engineering, and Scientific Applications, Freiburg, Germany, 1999
J. Gray, A. Reuter, Transaction Processing — Concepts and Techniques, Morgan Kaufmann, 1993
C. Hagen, G. Alonso, Backup and Process Migration Mechanisms in Process Support Systems, Technical Report, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland, 1998
D. Harel, State Charts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems, Science of Computer Programming Vol. 8, 1987
D. Harel, E. Gery, Executable Object Modeling with Statecharts, IEEE Computer Vol.30 No.7, 1997
S. Jablonski, C. Bussler, Workflow Management, Modeling Concepts, Architecture, and Implementation, International Thomson Computer Press, 1996
J. Klingemann, J. Waesch, K. Aberer, Deriving Service Models in Cross-Organizational Workflows, Int’l Workshop on Reasearch Issues in Data Engineering (RIDE), Sydney, Australia, 1999
M. Kamath, G. Alonso, R. Günthör, C. Mohan, Providing High Availability in Very Large Workflow Management Systems, Int’l Conf. on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), Avignon, France, 1996
C. Mohan, Workflow Management in the Internet Age, Tutorial, http://wwwrodin.inria.fr/~mohan
P. Muth, D. Wodtke, J. Weissenfels, G. Weikum, A. Kotz Dittrich, Enterprisewide Workflow Management based on State and Activity Charts, in [5]
R. Nelson, Probability, Stochastic Processes, and Queueing Theory, Springer-Verlag, 1995
H. Schuster, J. Neeb, R. Schamburger, A Configuration Management Approach for Large Workflow Management Systems, Int’l Joint Conf. on Work Activities Coordination and Collaboration (WACC), San Francisco, California, 1999
R. A. Sahner, K. S. Trivedi, A. Puliafito, Performance and Reliability Analysis of Computer Systems, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996
H.C. Tijms, Stochastic Models, John Wiley and Sons, 1994
Transaction Processing Performance Council, http://www.tpc.org/
Unified Modeling Language (UML) Version 1.1, http://www.rational.com/uml/
Workflow Management Coalition, http://www.wfmc.org/
D. Wodtke, G. Weikum, A Formal Foundation For Distributed Workflow Execution Based on State Charts, Int’l Conf. on Database Theory (ICDT), Delphi, Greece, 1997
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Gillmann, M., Weissenfels, J., Weikum, G., Kraiss, A. (2000). Performance and Availability Assessment for the Configuration of Distributed Workflow Management Systems. In: Zaniolo, C., Lockemann, P.C., Scholl, M.H., Grust, T. (eds) Advances in Database Technology — EDBT 2000. EDBT 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1777. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46439-5_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46439-5_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67227-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46439-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive