Towards Distributed BPEL Orchestrations

Web services are imposing as the technology to integrate highly heterogeneous systems. BPEL, the standard technology to compose services, assumes a single âorchestratorâ that controls the execution flow and coordinates the interactions with selected services. This centralized approach simplifies the coordination among components, but it is also a too heavy constraint. To this end, the paper introduces the idea of distributed orchestrations and presents a proposal to couple BPEL and distributed execution in mobile settings. The approach âexemplified on a simple case studyâ transforms a centralized BPEL process into a set of coordinated processes. An explicit meta-model and graph transformation supply the formal grounding to obtain a set of related processes, and to add the communication infrastructure among the newly created processes. The paper also presents a communication infrastructure based on tuple spaces to make the different orchestrators interact in mobile contexts. Keywords: WS-BPEL, Grap

Towards Distributed Workflow Process Management

Today, companies are driven by the rate at which technologies change and move towards global enterprises and virtual organizations in order to stay competitive. In global and virtual enterprises, business processes consist of multiple sub-processes that may span multiple time zones, organizational boundaries, and legal domains. Current workflow technology does not provide the necessary functionality to model, enact, and manage such processes due to its mostly centralized, coupled architecture and limited process management capabilities. In this paper, we present our on-going efforts to address some of the issues involved. In particular, we present an event-based infrastructure that supports distribution and decoupling, together with time-related constructs for addressing the time aspects of process management. 1