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Providing High Availability in Very Large Workflow Management Systems
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| Title |
Providing High Availability in Very Large Workflow Management Systems |
| Author(s) |
M. Kamath, G. Alonso, R. Günthör, C. Mohan |
| Type |
inproceedings |
| Booktitle |
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT'96) Avignon, France |
| Organization |
Institute for Information Systems, ETH Zürich |
| Month |
March
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| Year |
1996 |
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Abstract
Workflow management systems (WFMSs) support the modeling, coordinated
execution and monitoring of business processes within an
organization. In particular, very large workflow management systems
are used in organizations where the number of users may be in the tens
of thousands, the number of process instances in the hundreds of
thousands, and the number of sites in the thousands, 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 and hence continuous availability
is a key aspect of the system. 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
failures. An essential characteristic of our backup scheme is that it
allows the user to define different availability levels in order to
avoid high costs for maintaining backups for all process
instances. The backup scheme to support the different availability
levels 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.
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