A distributed service-oriented architecture for business process execution

The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) standardizes the development of composite enterprise applications that make use of software components exposed as Web services. BPEL processes are currently executed by a centralized orchestration engine, in which issues such as scalability and platform heterogeneity can be difficult to manage. This paper proposes a distributed agent-based orchestration engine in which several light-weight agents execute a portion of the original business process and collaborate in order to execute the complete process. The complete set of standard BPEL activities are supported, and the transformations of several BPEL activities to the agent-based architecture are described. Evaluations on an implementation of this architecture demonstrate that agent-based execution scales better than a non-distributed approach, with at least 70% and 120% improvements in process execution time, and throughput, respectively, even with a large number of concurrent process i...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TWEB
• Authors: Guoli Li, Vinod Muthusamy, Hans-Arno Jacobsen
• Keywords: BPEL, Orchestration Engine, Process Execution, TWEB 2010