Performance and Availability Assessment for the Configuration of Distributed Workflow Management Systems

Workflow management systems (WFMSs) that are geared for the orchestration of enterprise-wide or even "virtual-enterprise"-style business processes across multiple organizations are complex distributed systems. They consist of multiple workflow engines, application servers, and ORB-style communication servers. Thus, deriving a suitable configuration of an entire distributed WFMS for a given application workload is a difficult task. This paper presents a mathematically based method for configuring a distributed WFMS such that the application's demands regarding performance and availability can be met while aiming to minimize the total system costs. The major degree of freedom that the configuration method considers is the replication of the underlying software components, workflow engines and application servers of different types as well as the communication server, on multiple computers for load partitioning and enhanced availability. The mathematical core of the method consists of Ma..