Scalable peer-to-peer process management

The functionality of applications is increasingly being made available by services. General concepts and standards such as SOAP, WSDL and UDDI support the discovery and invocation of single web services. The state-of-the-art process management is conceptually based on a centralised process manager. The resources of this coordinator limit the number of concurrent process executions, especially as the coordinator has to persistently store each state change for recovery purposes. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by executing processes in a peerto-peer way exploiting all peers of the system. By distributing the execution and navigation costs, we can achieve a higher degree of scalability allowing for a much larger throughput of processes compared to centralised solutions. This paper describes our prototype system OSIRIS, which implements such a true peer-to-peer process execution. We further present very promising results verifying the advantages over centralised process management in terms of scalability.