A Chemistry-Inspired Workflow Management System for Decentralizing Workflow Execution

Abstract

With the recent widespread adoption of service-oriented architecture, the dynamic composition of services is now a crucial issue in the area of distributed computing. The coordination and execution of composite Web services are today typically conducted by heavyweight centralized workflow engines, leading to an increasing probability of processing and communication bottlenecks and failures. In addition, centralization induces higher deployment costs, such as the computing infrastructure to support the workflow engine, which is not affordable for a large number of small businesses and end-users. In a world where platforms are more and more dynamic and elastic as promised by cloud computing, decentralized and dynamic interaction schemes are required. Addressing the characteristics of such platforms, nature-inspired analogies recently regained attention to provide autonomous service coordination on top of dynamic large scale platforms. In this paper, we propose an approach for the decentralized execution of composite Web services based on an unconventional programming paradigm that relies on the chemical metaphor. It provides a high-level execution model that allows executing composite services in a decentralized manner. Composed of services communicating through a persistent shared space containing control and data flows between services, our architecture allows to distribute the composition coordination among nodes. A proof of concept is given, through the deployment of a software prototype implementing these concepts, showing the viability of an autonomic vision of service composition.