Introducing the Vienna Platform for Elastic Processes

Resource-intensive tasks are playing an increasing role in business processes. The emergence of Cloud computing has enabled the deployment of such tasks onto resources sourced on-demand from Cloud providers. This has enabled so-called elastic processes that are able to dynamically adjust their resource usage to meet varying workloads. Traditional Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) do not consider the needs of elastic processes such as monitoring facilities, tracking the current and future system landscape, reasoning about optimally utilizing resources given Quality of Service constraints, and executing necessary actions (e.g., start/stop servers, move services). This paper introduces ViePEP, a research BPMS capable of handling the aforementioned requirements of elastic processes.