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Synchronizing control flow in a tuplespace-based, distributed workflow management system

Published: 19 August 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Decentralized workflow enactment -- the process of evaluating control flow in a distributed manner -- is a key aspect of the implementation of a decentralized workflow management system (WfMS). A major challenge in this field is the support for join operations to synchronize concurrent threads of control flow. The original Linda model however does not provide operations for matching more than one tuple in a single operation -- complex logic needs to be implemented on the client side, having severe impact on performance and breaking the concept of coordination languages by mixing coordination and application logic. In this paper, we stress the need for an extended tuplespace model that natively supports the sync operation realizing WS-BPEL synchronizing joins directly on the tuplespace level. We pay special attention to the description of its semantics and propose an algorithm for efficient implementation on a single tuplespace. For the common case in distributed workflow enactment, where control flow is distributed over multiple tuplespaces, we present an optimization of the aforementioned algorithm in form of the sync pattern.

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Cited By

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  • (2011)A Simple Solution for Information Sharing in Hybrid Web Service CompositionProceedings of the 2011 IEEE 15th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference10.1109/EDOC.2011.16(235-244)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2011
  • (2010)Coordination for fragmented loops and scopes in a distributed business processProceedings of the 8th international conference on Business process management10.5555/1882061.1882080(178-194)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2010
  • (2010)Tuplespace middleware for Petri net-based workflow executionInternational Journal of Web and Grid Services10.1504/IJWGS.2010.0321906:1(35-57)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2010

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICEC '08: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Electronic commerce
August 2008
355 pages
ISBN:9781605580753
DOI:10.1145/1409540
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 19 August 2008

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Author Tags

  1. distributed workflows
  2. self coordinating components
  3. tuplespaces

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  • Research-article

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ICEC08
ICEC08: 10th International Conference on E-Commerce
August 19 - 22, 2008
Innsbruck, Austria

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Overall Acceptance Rate 150 of 244 submissions, 61%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2011)A Simple Solution for Information Sharing in Hybrid Web Service CompositionProceedings of the 2011 IEEE 15th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference10.1109/EDOC.2011.16(235-244)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2011
  • (2010)Coordination for fragmented loops and scopes in a distributed business processProceedings of the 8th international conference on Business process management10.5555/1882061.1882080(178-194)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2010
  • (2010)Tuplespace middleware for Petri net-based workflow executionInternational Journal of Web and Grid Services10.1504/IJWGS.2010.0321906:1(35-57)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2010

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