On Dead Path Elimination in Decentralized Process Executions

There has been a great deal of interest in recent years in the use of service oriented approach and relevant standards to implement business processes. Following the concepts of workflow-based process management, the major focus has been on service composition. Not surprisingly, this default composition approach suffers from the limitations of centralized workflow management. It is well recognized that a decentralized execution setting where composed services can establish P2P interactions, is central to a wide range of ubiquitous, mobile, large-scale and secure business process management. A natural way to enable the decentralized execution is to implement the relevant distributed cooperating processes of a centralized process on composed services. In this way, composed services can establish P2P interactions following the semantics of their processes. In this report, we present a generic approach that enables decentralized executions with such cooperating processes. Precisely, we present our method that derives the latter. We focus on the sophisticated control/data flow, conversational aspects and especially Dead Path Elimination that run counter to naive intuition, most of which, we explain using deeper analysis of the algorithms and data structures that we employed. Key-words: Workflow, P2P computing, Program Partitioning, Business Process Management, Dead Path Elimination Ce travail est partiellement supporté par les fonds du Ministère de la Culture, de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche de Grand-Duché de Luxembourg. Réf: BFR 04/108 ∗ INRIA LORIA, University of Nancy, [email protected] in ria -0 01 32 92 8, v er si on 2 26 F eb 2 00 7 L’Élimination des Chemins Morts dans des Exécutions Décentralisées des Procédés Résumé : L’Élimination des Chemins Morts dans des Exécutions Décentralisées des Procédés est une opération spćiale supportée par la plupart des outils de gestion de procédé centralisés. Ce travail porte sur la définition, l’analyze et l’adaptation de la même opération aux exécutions décentralisées des procédés. Mots-clés : Workflow, Système d’Information Egal-à-Egal, Partitions des Programmes, La Gestion des Procédés Métiers, L’élimination des Chemins Morts in ria -0 01 32 92 8, v er si on 2 26 F eb 2 00 7 On DPE in Decentralized Process Executions 3