Title: Scalable peer-to-peer process management

Authors: Christoph Schuler, Can Turker, Hans-Jorg Schek, Roger Weber, Heiko Schuldt

Addresses: ERGON Informatik AG, CH–8008 Zurich, Switzerland. ' Functional Genomics Center Zurich, CH–8057 Zurich, Switzerland. ' Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), CH–8092 Zurich, Switzerland. ' Platform Architecture, Credit Suisse, CH-8070 Zurich, Switzerland. ' Database and Information Systems Group, University of Basel, CH-4056 Basal, Switzerland

Abstract: The functionality of applications is increasingly being made available by services. General concepts and standards such as SOAP, WSDL and UDDI support the discovery and invocation of single web services. The state-of-the-art process management is conceptually based on a centralised process manager. The resources of this coordinator limit the number of concurrent process executions, especially as the coordinator has to persistently store each state change for recovery purposes. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by executing processes in a peer-to-peer way exploiting all peers of the system. By distributing the execution and navigation costs, we can achieve a higher degree of scalability allowing for a much larger throughput of processes compared to centralised solutions. This paper describes our prototype system OSIRIS, which implements such a true peer-to-peer process execution. We further present very promising results verifying the advantages over centralised process management in terms of scalability.

Keywords: process management; peer-to-peer execution; service orientation; scalability; hyperdatabases; OSIRIS; web services; process modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBPIM.2006.010026

International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, 2006 Vol.1 No.2, pp.129 - 142

Published online: 08 Jun 2006 *

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