Jadex WfMS: Distributed Workflow Management for Private Clouds

Abstract

Structuring an organization around its business processes has many benefits for both the processes themselves as well as the workflow and business process management within an organization in general. However, there are many challenges that make such a transition from a classical hierarchic to a state-of-the-art process organization difficult. In particular, traditional departments often resist loss of autonomy within their organization and, thus, may prevent successful implementation of business process management techniques such as process-oriented workflow management systems. Therefore, this paper proposes a flexible workflow management system architecture consisting of multiple parts that can be replicated and distributed within an organization's private cloud network. Based on distributed components of a workflow management system, it supports both organizations with legacy organizational structures as well as those which require increased autonomy of their respective organizational units. As a result, this system allows, on the one hand side, to manage some organizational units independently and to regulate them in a distributed, process-driven way while, on the other, still allowing the overall organization to exploit many advantages of a centralized workflow management system. The resulting system is based on experiences of a DFG funded technology transfer project aiming at applying previous research results in autonomous business process management to practical needs and requirements of a real production system application.