language: en

Exotica/FMQM: A Persistent Message-Based Architecture for Distributed Workflow Management

G. Alonso, C. Mohan, R. Gunthor
IBM Almaden Research Center
650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA 95120, USA.
E-mail: {gustavoa,rgunther,mohan}@almaden.ibm.com
D. Agrawal, A. El Abbadi
Computer Science Department, UC Santa Barbara,
Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.
E-mail: {agrawal,amr}@cs.ucsb.edu
M. Kamath
Computer Science Department, UM at Amherst,
Amherst, MA 01003, USA.
E-mail: kamath@cs.umass.edu

Abstract In the past few years there has been an increasing interest in workflow applications as a way of supporting complex business processes in modern corporations. Given the nature of the environment and the technology involved, workflow applications are inherently distributed and pose many interesting challenges to the system designer. In most cases, a client/server architecture is used in which knowledge about the processes being executed is centralized in one node to facilitate monitoring, auditing, and to simplify synchronization. In this paper, we explore a novel distributed architecture, Exotica/FMQM, for workflow systems in which the need for such a centralized database is eliminated. Instead, we use persistent messages as the means to store the information relevant to the execution of a business process. Our approach is to completely distribute the execution of a process so individual nodes are independent. The advantages of this approach are increased resilience to failures and greater scalability and flexibility of the system configuration.

Keywords Workflow Management Systems, Distributed Systems, reliability, scalability.

1 INTRODUCTION