A goal-driven auto-configuration tool for the distributed workflow management system mentorlite
Michael Gillmann, Jeanine Weissenfels, German Shegalov, Wolfgang Wonner, Gerhard Weikum
2000
Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data - SIGMOD '00
The Mentor-lite prototype has been developed within the research project "Architecture, Configuration, and Administration of Large Workflow Management Systems" funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG). In this paper, we outline the distributed architecture of Mentor-lite and elaborate on a goal-driven autoconfiguration tool for Mentor-lite and similar workflow management systems (WFMS). This tool aims to recommend an appropriate system configuration in terms of replicated workflow,
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... ion, and communication servers, so as to meet given goals for performance, availability, and performability at low system costs. The demo will show the monitoring capabilities of Mentor-lite and the various components of the autoconfiguration tool. System Overview The Mentor-lite prototype system for distributed workflow management has evolved from its predecessor Mentor [MWW+98a, MWW+98b], but aims at a simpler architecture. The main goal of Mentor-lite has been to build a light-weight, extensible, and tailorable workflow management system (WFMS) with small footprint and easy-to-use administration capabilities. Our approach is to provide only kernel functionality inside the workflow engine, and consider system components like history management and worklist management as extensions on top of the kernel. The key point to retain the light-weight nature is that these extensions are implemented as workflows themselves. An invocation interface for application programs is provided by a generic IDL interface on the engine side and specific wrappers on the application side [MWG+99] . As shown in Figure1, the basic building block of Mentor-lite is an interpreter for workflow specifications. In Mentor-lite, workflows are specified in terms of state and activity charts, the specification formalism that has been adopted for the behavioral dimension of the UML industry standard and was already used in Mentor. Two additional components, the communication manager (ComMgr) and the log manager (LogMgr), are closely integrated with the workflow interpreter. All three components together form the workflow engine. The execution of a workflow instance can be distributed over several workflow engines at different sites. A separate workflow log is used at each site where a Mentor-lite workflow engine is running. Databases like the workflow repository (i.e., a repository of workflow specifications) or the worklist database can be shared by Mentor-lite workflow engines at different sites. Wrapper Application Program
doi:10.1145/342009.336577
dblp:conf/sigmod/GillmannWSWW00
fatcat:vuf7z4tiyzga3jacke32u4oylm