Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud

With the advent of cloud computing, organizations are nowadays able to react rapidly to changing demands for computational resources. Not only individual applications can be hosted on virtual cloud infrastructures, but also complete business processes. This allows the realization of so-called elastic processes, i.e., processes which are carried out using elastic cloud resources. Despite the manifold benefits of elastic processes, there is still a lack of solutions supporting them. In this paper, we identify the state of the art of elastic Business Process Management with a focus on infrastructural challenges. We conceptualize an architecture for an elastic Business Process Management System and discuss existing work on scheduling, resource allocation, monitoring, decentralized coordination, and state management for elastic processes. Furthermore, we present two representative elastic Business Process Management Systems which are intended to counter these challenges. Based on our findings, we identify open issues and outline possible research directions for the realization of elastic processes and elastic Business Process Management.Comment: Please cite as: S. Schulte, C. Janiesch, S. Venugopal, I. Weber, and P. Hoenisch (2015). Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume NN, Number N, NN-NN., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2014.09.00

Resources allocation and scheduling approaches for business process applications in Cloud contexts

International audienceIn the last years, the Cloud computing environment has emerged as new execution support of business process. However, despite the proven benefits of using Cloud to run business process, users lack guidance for choosing between multiple offerings while taking into account several objectives, which are often conflicting. On the other side, elastic computing, such as Amazon EC2, allows users to allocate and release compute resources (virtual machines) on-demand and pay only for what they use. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the number of virtual machines is infinite. This feature of Clouds has been called "illusion of infinite resources''. Moreover, including human resources in the business process execution process make the automated execution of workflow difficult, due to the fact that the number of human resources is finite. In this paper, we develop an allocation strategy for Cloud computing platform taking into account the above characteristics. More precisely, we propose three complementary bi-criterion approaches for resources allocation and scheduling of business process on distributed Cloud resources

Towards the Exploration of Task and Workflow Scheduling Methods and Mechanisms in Cloud Computing Environment

Cloud computing sets a domain and application-specific distributed environment to distribute the services and resources among users. There are numerous heterogeneous VMs available in the environment to handle user requests. The user requests are defined with a specific deadline. The scheduling methods are defined to set up the order of request execution in the cloud environment. The scheduling methods in a cloud environment are divided into two main categories called Task and Workflow Scheduling. This paper, is a study of work performed on task and workflow scheduling. Various feature processing, constraints-restricted, and priority-driven methods are discussed in this research. The paper also discussed various optimization methods to improve scheduling performance and reliability in the cloud environment. Various constraints and performance parameters are discussed in this research

QoS-aware predictive workflow scheduling

This research places the basis of QoS-aware predictive workflow scheduling. This research novel contributions will open up prospects for future research in handling complex big workflow applications with high uncertainty and dynamism. The results from the proposed workflow scheduling algorithm shows significant improvement in terms of the performance and reliability of the workflow applications

Multi-objective resources allocation approaches for workflow applications in Cloud environments

International audienceResources allocation and scheduling has been recognised as an important topic for business process execution. However, despite the proven benefits of using Cloud to run business process, users lack guid- ance for choosing between multiple offering while taking into account several objectives which are often conflicting. Moreover, when running business processes it is difficult to automate all tasks. In this paper, we propose three complementary approaches for Cloud computing platform taking into account these specifications

Deadline-Budget constrained Scheduling Algorithm for Scientific Workflows in a Cloud Environment

Recently cloud computing has gained popularity among e-Science environments as a high performance computing platform. From the viewpoint of the system, applications can be submitted by users at any moment in time and with distinct QoS requirements. To achieve higher rates of successful applications attending to their QoS demands, an effective resource allocation (scheduling) strategy between workflow\u27s tasks and available resources is required. Several algorithms have been proposed for QoS workflow scheduling, but most of them use search-based strategies that generally have a higher time complexity, making them less useful in realistic scenarios. In this paper, we present a heuristic scheduling algorithm with quadratic time complexity that considers two important constraints for QoS-based workflow scheduling, time and cost, named Deadline-Budget Workflow Scheduling (DBWS) for cloud environments. Performance evaluation of some well-known scientific workflows shows that the DBWS algorithm accomplishes both constraints with higher success rate in comparison to the current state-of-the-art heuristic-based approaches