ViePEP – A BPMS for Elastic Processes

Abstract. In today’s IT industry resource-intensive tasks are playing an increasing role in business processes. By the emergence of Cloud computing it is nowadays possible to deploy such tasks onto computing resources leased in an on-demand fashion from Cloud providers. This enabled the realization of so-called Elastic Processes (EPs). These are able to dynamically adjust their used resources in order to meet varying workloads. Till now, traditional Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) do not consider the needs of Elastic Processes such as monitoring the current system load, reasoning about optimally utilized resources, in order to ensure given Quality of Service constraints while executing required actions such as starting, stopping servers or moving services from one server to an other. This paper focuses on our current work on ViePEP, a research BPMS for the Cloud capable of handling the aforementioned requirements of EPs.