Optimal Deployment of Configurable Business Processes in Cloud Federations

Abstract

Configurable processes are increasingly being adopted by enterprises that seek experience sharing and best practice adoption. A configurable process is a customizable model that specifies how different enterprises perform similar processes. At the modeling level, a configurable process model provides for flexible business process (BP) reuse by (de)selecting the (ir)relevant parts to derive a particular process variant. At the exploitation level, it offers flexibility and agility to an enterprise looking to outsource its BP to different providers cooperating in a cloud federation. More specifically, an enterprise can use a configurable process model to derive particular process variants that it outsources depending on its objectives. In particular, it may opt for outsourcing the variant that results in the optimal deployment , e.g., having the minimal cost of allocated cloud services that fulfill the user quality of service (QoS) requirements. However, identifying the optimal deployment variants is a complex problem because of the heterogeneity of services within a cloud federation and the number of possible variants that can be derived from a configurable process model. In addition, the complexity of this problem increases for variable user QoS requirements. In this paper, we propose an approach to derive, from a configurable process model, the variant that has the optimal deployment in a cloud federation. We propose a linear programming approach that accounts for the variability of both the BP model and the user QoS requirements, and that ensures an optimal time-aware cloud service allocation. We experimentally show the effectiveness and flexibility of our approach on a generated testbed.