Problem Description
Resource-intensive tasks are playing an increasing role in business processes. The emergence of Cloud computing has enabled the deployment of such tasks onto resources sourced on-demand from Cloud providers. This has enabled so-called elastic processes that are able to dynamically adjust their resource usage to meet varying workloads.
Traditional Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) do not consider the needs of elastic processes such as monitoring facilities, tracking the current and future system landscape, reasoning about optimally utilizing resources given Quality of Service constraints, and executing necessary actions (e.g., start/stop servers, move services). Hence, we are developed ViePEP - the Vienna Platform for Elastic Processes. ViePEP is a research BPMS capable of handling the aforementioned requirements of elastic processes. It provides a Workflow Manager as well as the means to control the Cloud resources needed for the execution and invocation of single workflow steps, which are realized as REST-based Web services.
Architecture
Acknowledgements
ViePEP makes use of the OpenStack IaaS cloud computing framework and for the resource optimization IBM CPLEX. The implementation is partly based on work by Li and Srikumar, which has been presented in their paper "Using reinforcement learning for controlling an elastic web application hosting platform". The first version of ViePEP has been partly done during Philipp Hoenisch's stay at the University of New South Wales. Parts of the implementation of ViePEP has been done as part of the SIMPLI-CITY FP7-ICT project (Grant agreement no. 318201), CREMA and the FWF project Audit4SOAs (P23313-N23).
Publications
- P. Hoenisch, D. Schuller, S. Schulte, C. Hochreiner, S. Dustdar (2016). Optimization of Complex Elastic Processes. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, Volume 9, Number 5, 700-713.
- C. Hochreiner (2015). Privacy-Aware Scheduling for Inter-Organizational Processes. In 7th Central-European Workshop on Services and their Composition (ZEUS 2015), volume 1360 CEUR-WS, pages 63-68, Jena, Germany.
- P. Hoenisch, C. Hochreiner, D. Schuller, S. Schulte, J. Mendling, S. Dustdar (2015). Cost-Efficient Scheduling of Elastic Processes in Hybrid Clouds. In IEEE 8th International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD 2015), pages 17-24. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA.
- S. Schulte, C. Janiesch, S. Venugopal, I. Weber, P. Hoenisch (2015). Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume 46, 36-50.
- P. Hoenisch, D. Schuller, C. Hochreiner, S. Schulte, S. Dustdar (2014). Elastic Process Optimization - The Service Instance Placement Problem, Technical Report TUV-1841-2014-01, Distributed Systems Group, Vienna University of Technology.
- P. Hoenisch (2014). ViePEP - A BPMS for Elastic Processes. In 6th Central-European Workshop on Services and their Composition (ZEUS 2014), volume 1140 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, pages 61-68. CEUR-WS.org.
- S. Schulte, D. Schuller, P. Hoenisch, U. Lampe, S. Dustdar, and R. Steinmetz (2013). Cost-Driven Optimization of Cloud Resource Allocation for Elastic Processes. International Journal of Cloud Computing, Volume 1, Number 2, 1-15.
- P. Hoenisch, S. Schulte, S. Dustdar (2013). Workflow Scheduling and Resource Allocation for Cloud-based Execution of Elastic Processes. In 6th IEEE International Conference on Service Oriented Computing and Applications (SOCA 2013), pages 1-8. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA.
- P. Hoenisch, S. Schulte, S. Dustdar, and S. Venugopal (2013). Self-Adaptive Resource Allocation for Elastic Process Execution. In IEEE 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD 2013), pages 220-227. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA.
- S. Schulte, P. Hoenisch, S. Venugopal, and S. Dustdar (2013). Introducing the Vienna Platform for Elastic Processes. In Performance Assessment and Auditing in Service Computing Workshop (PAASC 2012) at 10th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2012), volume 7759 of Lecture Notes on Computer Science, pages 179-190. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg.
- S. Schulte, P. Hoenisch, S. Venugopal, and S. Dustdar (2013). Realizing Elastic Processes with ViePEP. In 10th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2012) - Demos, volume 7759 of Lecture Notes on Computer Science, pages 439-443. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg.