Survivability Architecture for Workflow Management Systems

The survivability of critical infrastructure systems has been gaining increasing concern from the industry. The survivability research area addresses the issue of infrastructure systems that continues to provide pre− established service levels to users in the face of disorders and react to changes in the surrounding environment. Workflow management systems need to be survivable since they are used to support critical and sensitive business processes. They require a high level of dependability and should not allow process instances to be interrupted or aborted due to failures. Moreover, due to their sensitivity, business process should reflect any change in the environment. In this paper we describe the work on increasing the survivability of the METEOR workflow management system. We define an architecture describing the main technologies that enable survivability in WfMS. Using the developed architecture we describe two modules that have been implemented: dynamic change and adaptation module.