Providing High Availability in Very Large Worklflow Management Systems
Providing High Availability in Very Large Worklflow Management Systems
复制标题
在超大型工作流管理系统中提供高可用性
DOI：
10.1007/bfb0014169
复制
发表时间：
1996
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
C. Mohan
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
M. Kamath;G. Alonso;R. Günthör;C. Mohan
工作流管理系统（WFMS）支持组织内业务流程的建模、协调执行和监控。特别地，非常大的工作流管理系统被用在具有数千个用户、数十万个过程实例和数千个站点的组织中，所有这些都分布在广泛的地理区域上。在这些环境中，故障的工作流管理系统或底层的工作流数据库存储的元信息的过程是不能容忍的。本文针对工作流管理系统中的高可用性问题，提出了一种备份技术，该技术可以确保流程实例的执行在任何时间点发生故障时都可以恢复。我们的备份方案的一个基本特征是，它允许用户定义不同的可用性级别，从而降低维护备份的成本。备份计划是使用工作流语义，我们相信将（i）使其独立于底层的工作流数据库，从而允许使用异构数据库作为主要和备份，（ii）减少开销，特别是当相比，由数据库系统提供的备份方案。
Workflow management systems (WFMS) support the modeling, coordinated execution and monitoring of business processes within an organization. In particular, very large workflow management systems are used in organizations with several thousand users, hundreds of thousands of process instances, and several thousand sites, all distributed over wide geographic areas. In these environments, failure of the WFMS or the underlying workflow database which stores the meta-information about the processes is not tolerable. This paper addresses the problem of providing high availability in workflow management systems by proposing a backup technique which ensures that execution of a process instance can be resumed at any point in time in the event of a failure. An essential characteristic of our backup scheme is that it allows the user to define different availability levels, reducing the cost of maintaining backups. The backup scheme is implemented using the workflow semantics, which we believe will (i) make it independent of the underlying workflow database, thus permitting the use of heterogeneous databases as primary and backup, (ii) reduce overheads, especially when compared to backup schemes provided by database systems.