Towards Runtime Migration of WS-BPEL Processes

The decentralized execution of business process instances is a promising approach for enabling flexible reactions to contextual changes at runtime. Most current approaches address such process distribution by physical fragmentation of processes and by dynamic assignment of resulting static process parts to different business partners. In order to enable a more dynamic segmentation of such responsibilities at runtime, this paper proposes to use process runtime migration as a means of logical process fragmentation. Accordingly, the paper presents a general migration metadata model and a corresponding basic privacy and security mechanism for enhancing existing process models with the ability for runtime migration while respecting the intensions and privacy requirements of both process modelers and initiators. The approach is conceptually evaluated by applying it to WS-BPEL processes and comparing the results to the general concept of process fragmentation.