Meta-process: a noval approach for decentralized execution of process

Abstract

With the rapid growth of internet usage for enterprise-wide and cross-enterprise business applications (such as those in Electronic Commerce), workflow systems are gaining importance as an infrastructure for automating inter-organizational interactions. However, the traditional centralized workflow management technology can no longer meet the needs of current application services. For example, in e-commerce, cross-enterprise business applications may cause many security problems and cross-domain problems in the implementation of workflow. At the same time, due to the uncertainty and variability of environment and user requirements in practical applications, many business logics are difficult to be completely defined in advance. Therefore workflow models need to be immediately built or adjusted dynamically. Nowadays, distributed scheduling and decentralized control of workflow have become the emerging trend and are facing many challenges at the forefront of Internet development technology. In this paper, a distributed workflow control execution method based on “meta-process” is proposed. Specifically, we designed and implemented a decentralized distributed scheduling management system for workflow tasks. To manage and control the distributed scheduling of workflow, we constructed a “meta-process”, which can ensure the integrity of the control chain in the distributed scheduling process. Our system can efficiently handle the data state migration between task nodes and supports the dynamic adjustment of the workflow model. For validation, we simulated a large number of service scheme samples and applied them to the system, which proved that all service cases can be executed correctly. Therefore, the feasibility of this method is verified.