Problem Description
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). Hence, we are currently working on ViePEP, a research BPMS capable of handling the aforementioned requirements of elastic processes. It provides a Workflow Manager as well as the means to control the Cloud resources needed for the execution and invocation of single workflow steps, which are realized as REST-based Web services.
Demo
The following Youtube video shows a simplified demo of ViePEP's capabilities from the perspective of a provider of elastic processes, i.e., a broker who gets workflow requests from clients and automatically provides the Cloud resources to execute the according workflow steps (services).
Acknowledgements
ViePEP makes use of the OpenStack IaaS cloud computing framework. The implementation is partly based on work by Li and Srikumar, which has been presented in their paper "Using reinforcement learning for controlling an elastic web application hosting platform". The first version of ViePEP has been partly done during Philipp Hönisch's stay at the University of New South Wales.
People
Contact
s.schulte@vitalab.tuwien.ac.atStaff
- Schahram Dustdar
- Stefan Schulte
- Philipp Hönisch