Runtime Verification of Business Cloud Workflow Temporal Conformance

Abstract

Business cloud workflows are often designed with multiple time constraints for timely response to business requests. To ensure on-time completion of workflow instances, workflow temporal conformance state needs to be constantly monitored and verified at runtime. Considering the fact that there are a large number of workflow instances running in a parallel fashion in many business scenarios, conventional verification approaches for time-related properties using such as temporal logic or timed Petri nets are not feasible due to the limitation of low efficiency at runtime. To address this issue, we propose a new approach to automated runtime verification of temporal conformance for parallel workflow instances in a cloud environment. Instead of using response time to verify temporal conformance of every single workflow as in conventional strategies, workflow throughput is employed as the performance measurement to efficiently monitor a large number of parallel workflow instances. On this basis we present a novel conformance verification strategy. This strategy considers the effect of time delay propagation in the cloud workflow systems to accurately verify workflow runtime temporal conformance. Our verification strategy is implemented in a prototype cloud workflow system and the evaluation results show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art workflow temporal verification strategy.