Engineering a Highly Scalable Object-aware Process Management Engine Using Distributed Microservices

Andrews, Kevin and Steinau, Sebastian and Reichert, Manfred (2018) Engineering a Highly Scalable Object-aware Process Management Engine Using Distributed Microservices. In: 26th International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS'18), October 22-26, 2018, Valletta, Malta.

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Abstract

Scalability of information systems has been a research topic for many years and is as relevant as ever with the dramatic increases in digitization of business processes and data. This also applies to process-aware information systems, most of which are currently incapable of scaling horizontally, i.e., over multiple servers. This paper presents the design science artifact that resulted from engineering a highly scalable process management system relying on the object-aware process man-agement paradigm. The latter allows for distributed process execution by conceptually encapsulating process logic and data into multiple in-teracting objects that may be processed concurrently. These objects, in turn, are represented by individual microservices at run-time, which can be hosted transparently across entire server clusters. We present mea-surement data that evaluates the scalability of the artifact on a compute cluster, demonstrating that the current prototypical implementation of the run-time engine can handle very large numbers of users and process instances concurrently in single-case mechanism experiments with large amounts of simulated user input. Finally, the development of scalable process execution engines will further the continued maturation of the data-centric business process management field.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Subjects: DBIS Research > Publications
Depositing User: Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert
Date Deposited: 26 Aug 2018 09:26
Last Modified: 12 Mar 2020 22:48
URI: http://dbis.eprints.uni-ulm.de/id/eprint/1666

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