Flexibility for Distributed Workflows

The capability to dynamically adapt workflow instances during runtime (e.g., to add, delete or move activities) constitutes a fundamental challenge for any workflow manage¬ment system (WfMS). While there has been significant research on ad-hoc workflow changes and on related correctness issues, there exists only little work on how to provide respective runtime flexibility in an enterprise-wide context as well. Here, scalability at the presence of high loads constitutes an essential requirement, often necessitating distributed (i.e., piecewise) control of a workflow instance by different workflow servers, which should be as independent from each other as pos¬sible. This chapter presents advanced concepts and techniques for enabling ad-hoc workflow changes in a distributed WfMS as well. The focus of our work is on mini¬mizing the communication costs among workflow servers, while ensuring a correct execution behavior as well as correctness of ad-hoc workflow changes at any time.