AN ADAPTIVE P2P WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Flexibility and Exception Handling Support in P2P Based Workflow
A. Aldeeb, K. Crockett and M. J. Stanton
Department of Computing and Mathmatics,
Manchester Metropolitan Univer
sity, Chester Street, Manchester, M1 5GD, UK
Keywords: Workflow management system, i
nstance level adaptation, workflow flexibility, P2P, exception handling.
Abstract: Workflow processes are moving from long-lasting, well-defined, centralised business processes to
dynamically changing, distributed business processes with many variants. Existing research concentrates on
decentralisation and on adaptability but there is more to be done on adaptability in decentralised workflow
systems. The aim of this research is to overcome the limitation of current workflow management systems
by moving from a centralised workflow to a flexible decentralised peer-to-peer (P2P) workflow system. A
P2P workflow management architecture is proposed which offers flexibility, exception handling and
dynamic changes to both the workflow process definition and process instance level by applying a range of
Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. An Exception Handling Peer (EHP) captures exceptions, from the
workflow peers, characterises the exceptions and applies a recovery policy. Initial prototyping of the
system has been carried out using JBoss jBPM whilst the P2P network environment of this prototype is
based on Sun MicroSystem’s JXTA.
1 INTRODUCTION
Workflow is the automation of a business process, in
which documents, information or tasks are passed
from one participant to another for action, according
to a set of procedural rules (Fischer, 2002). A
workflow management system (WFMS) is a
software tool for defining, instantiating, executing
and monitoring workflows.
In the literature, most workflow systems are
base
d on centralised client/server architecture
(Bauer, Reichert and Dadam, 2003). This requires a
centralised database to store the workflow process
definition and a centralised workflow engine to
manage activities such as coordination and
monitoring process execution (Yan, 2004). The main
disadvantages of any such architecture are the
potential bottleneck that can arise during process
execution, and that the central database can become
single point of failure. Workflow processes are
moving from long-lasting, well-defined, centralised
business processes to dynamically changing,
distributed business processes with many variants
(Aalst and Basten, 2002; Sadiq and Orlowska, 2005;
Bauer, Reichert and Dadam, 2003). Workflow
applications are inherently distributed. They involve
people, resources and tools that may be distributed
over a wide geographic area (Aalst and Basten,
2002; Aalst and Hee, 2002). In a peer-to-peer (P2P)
architecture each workstation has equivalent
capabilities and responsibilities. Recent research has
shown an increased interest in P2P based workflow
(Fakas and Karakostas, 2004; Yan, 2004). However,
research on implementing workflow in a peer-to-
peer environment is still at the conceptual stage. In
addition, the research in P2P has tended to focus on
tasks coordination rather than on flexibility and
exception handling in workflow systems.
The aim of this research is to overcome the
li
mitation of the current workflow management
systems by moving from a centralised workflow to a
flexible decentralised P2P workflow system. It
proposes a P2P workflow management system
which offers flexibility, exception handling and
dynamic changes to both the workflow process
definition and process instance level by applying a
range of AI techniques. The rest of the paper is
organised as follows. A brief description of the
literature and related work in decentralised
workflow and flexibility concepts is presented in
Section 2. In Section 3, an adaptive P2P workflow
is introduced with high level architecture diagrams
428
Aldeeb A., Crockett K. and J. Stanton M. (2007).
AN ADAPTIVE P2P WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEM - Flexibility and Exception Handling Support in P2P Based Workflow.
In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - ISAS, pages 428-433
Copyright
c
SciTePress
describing its different components. In Section 4, an
example is presented to help illustrate the build-time
and run-time functions of the system and the current
state of implementation. Finally, conclusion and
future work are discussed in Section 5.
2 LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 The Workflow Reference Model
A workflow reference model was released by the
Workflow Management Coalition in October 1994
(http://www.wfmc.org/standards/referencemodel.ht
m). This reference model consists of central
workflow enactment services and five components:
process definition tools, administration and
monitoring, workflow client applications, invoked
applications and other workflow enactment services.
In addition, the reference model defines five
interfaces connecting these components with the
central enactment services (Plesums, 2005). The
majority of deployable workflow systems are based
on, and compatible with, this reference model (Yan,
2004; Buhler and Vidal, 2005).
2.2 Decentralised Workflow Systems
Exotica/FMQM (Alonso et al 1995) is a novel,
distributed workflow architecture, which does not
build on a centralized database. Instead, persistent
messages are used to store and exchange the
information between autonomous nodes in order to
enact a workflow process. Each node works
independently, and interacts with other nodes
through the persistent messages notifying them that
a step of the process has been completed.
Once a process has been defined, its definition is
compiled to determine the information relevant to
each node, binding activities to the nodes where they
will be performed. Since there is no centralized
server, the problems of centralisation are removed.
Node failures will stop the execution of process
instances that use that node, but will not prevent
other process instances from being executed at other
nodes.
This was one of the earliest decentralised
workflow systems, which concentrated on data
management rather than exception handling or
dynamic changes in workflows.
Another decentralised workflow architecture,
SwinDew (Yan, 2004), applies P2P concepts to
workflow scenarios and decentralises both data and
control. In this approach, each system node acts as a
client application and performs both data repository
and workflow engine functions. SwinDew focus’s
on workflow administration and management issues
without detailed investigation of exceptions handling
or of dynamic changes to process instances or
schema.
Fakas and Karakostas (2004) designed a P2P
workflow management system facilitating the
distributed definition, execution and management of
workflows. The architecture of this system is based
on the concepts of the Web Workflow Peer (WWP).
A WWP is a proposed processing entity that
facilitates users to participate, administrate and
manage workflow process. A peer user may
participate as an administrator or participating Peer
in a particular workflow instance. P2P and the
centralised approaches have been compared in terms
of message exchanges and sizes. It was found that,
whilst there is a requirement for additional
notification messages in this architecture, the P2P
has a significant advantage when activities are
associated with large messages.
2.3 Workflow Flexibility and
Adaptation
Exceptions that occur during workflow execution
have been divided into: basic failures, application
failures, expected exceptions and unexpected
exceptions (Casati, 1998). Basic failure is related to
failures at system level (e.g., DBMS, operating
systems, or network failure). Application failure
corresponds to failures of any applications invoked
by the WFMS. Expected exceptions correspond to
predictable deviations from the normal behaviour of
a process. Unexpected exceptions occur when there
are inconsistencies between the workflow and its
corresponding real world business process.
Flexibility in workflows may be achieved by
either selection or by adaptation (Halliday, 2001).
Flexibility by selection will only handle exceptions
where they can be predicted before system
development. Time, cost and knowledge limitations
will prevent successful development of systems that
rely on flexibility by selection alone. Flexibility by
adaptation involves altering the workflow process to
include one or more new execution paths and can be
subdivided into evolutionary adaptation and instance
adaptation. Evolutionary adaptation is a result of
evolutionary change initiated by business managers
to improve efficiency or responsiveness, or is forced
by legislature or changing market demands (Aalst
and Basten, 2002). Evolutionary adaptation affects
AN ADAPTIVE P2P WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEM - Flexibility and Exception Handling Support in P2P
Based Workflow
429
new instances but it may also influence old
instances.
Instance adaptation is related to ad-hoc change
which may occur at only a specific instance as a
result of an error, a rare event, or special demands of
the user. This type of change will create a variant of
workflow process. Instance adaptation involves
altering one or more running instances of a given
schema (Halliday, 2001). Inheritance concepts can
offer some support for ad-hoc change (Aalst and
Basten, 2002) where the predefined workflow
process definition is the parent class and the
modified workflow process definition (variant)
resulting from an ad-hoc change would be a child
class.
Workflow
Definition
Peer
Workflow Designer
Peer Services
Group Service
Pipe Service
Discovery Service
Advertisement service
Workflow Administrator
Exception
Handling
Peer
Administration
and Monitoring
Peer
WF Peer 1
Associated Workflow
Participant
WF Peer 2
Associated Workflow
Participant
WF Peer N
Associated Workflow
Participant
Current
workflow management systems lack
support for runtime adaptability (Rinderle, Reichert
and Dadam, 2004a; Muller and Greiner and Rahm,
2004; Kammar, 2000; Chung, 2003; Divitini and
Simne, 2000; Rinderle, Reichert and Dadam,
2004b). Flexibility and exception handling
approaches are based on the centralised WFMS.
Much work has been done on decentralisation, and
on flexibility and adaptability but these need to be
considered for decentralised workflow systems.
The research presented in this paper applies the
flexibility, adaptability and exception handling
concepts to a decentralised P2P based WFMS. An
adaptive decentralised P2P WFMS architecture is
proposed, which will allow for flexibility by
selection at design time, and provide both
evolutionary and instance adaptation at run-time.
Additionally, due to its modular structure, the
architecture will support experimentation and
analysis of various techniques for the detection of
exceptions at instance level. It will then be possible
to use information about past exceptions to
determine whether there is a need for the process to
evolve.
3 AN ADAPTIVE P2P WFMS
An adaptive P2P WFMS that can handle exceptions
at both schema and instance level in a dynamic
environment is described in Figure 1. The proposed
Adaptive P2P WFMS is inspired by current research
on the administration and management of P2P based
workflow systems (Yan, 2004; Fakas, 2004; Coon,
2002). Peers join “virtual communities” according
to their capabilities and discover each other using
the services provided by an open P2P network. The
coordination is performed by notification messages
exchanged between peers. In addition to this, in the
architecture proposed here, exceptions are handled
by a dedicated exception handling peer.
Figure 1: The adaptive P2P workflow system.
Two functions are conducted by this adaptive
P2P WFMS: A Build-time function, which includes
workflow process modelling, storing process
definitions and distributing the process to workflow
peers, and a Run-time function, which includes
process instance creation, task coordination and
exception handling procedures.
As shown in figure 1, the P2P network provides
services that include advertisement services, group
services, peer services, pipe services, and discovery
services. The main components of the architecture
are described in the following sections.
3.1 Workflow Peer (WFP)
The WFP can reside on any machine on the P2P
network enabling direct communication with other
workflow peers to enact the workflow process. The
internal structure of the WFP used here is the same
as that described in (Yan, 2004), consisting of user,
task, and flow components. It also maintains four
data repositories – a peer repository, a resource and
tools repository, a task repository and a process
repository. Each WFP is associated with a workflow
participant and each performs a part of the
workflow. Once the task is completed, the WFP
informs its successor and the next task of the process
may be executed.
Process co-ordination is achieved by the
exchange of messages between peers. Each message
will be one of three types: information, control, or
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exception. Information and control messages are
used for data and control transfer between peers.
The exception message is used in case of an
exception appearance. Each peer is provided with
expected-exception handling facilities. However, if
a peer faces unexpected exception, this will require
the intervention of the exception handling peer to
initiate an exception handling routine.
3.2 Workflow Definition Peer (WFDP)
Exception Handling User Interface
Exceptions
Data
Workflow Administrato
r
Exception handling
response
Case retrieval
Case
Ada
p
tation
Case Anal
y
sis
Exception
characterisation
Event Handler
CBR Unit
The function of this node is the design and the
storage of the whole workflow schema at build-time.
The workflow process is partitioned to separate tasks
according to the workflow participants and the
organisational structure. These tasks are then
distributed to the corresponding workflow peers.
Figure 2 shows the internal structure of the WFDP.
Definition Tool
Process
Partitioning
Mechanism
Variant
Tracke
r
Version
tracker
Variants
Versions
Process
Definition
Partition Distribution
Component
Ad-hoc changes capturing
(From exception handling peer)
Workflow Designer WFD
Figure 2: The workflow definition peer structure.
A workflow process definition resulting from an
evolutionary change is called a “version” of the
workflow process. New cases are handled according
to the most recent version of a process. The current
version of the process is that determined as the most
likely to fit the incoming case. A workflow process
definition resulting from an ad-hoc change which
affects the running workflow instances is called
variant of the workflow process (Aalst and Basten,
2002). Repeated similar variants may lead to
evolutionary change of the workflow process. The
WFDP holds all versions and variants of the
workflow process. To reduce storage costs and
simplify process management it may be necessary to
keep the number of active versions to minimum.
Evolutionary and ad-hoc changes may affect only
particular tasks in the workflow process and their
associated WF peers.
3.3 Exception Handling Peer (EHP)
The Exception Handling Peer captures exceptions
from the workflow peers, characterises the
exceptions and applies a recovery policy. The
structure of the EHP is shown in figure 3. It will
handle exceptions at the instance level.
Figure 3: The workflow exception handling peer.
Once the EHP receives an exception message
from a workflow peer, a direct connection between
both will be established. The exception will be
resolved by proper exception handler candidates,
such as retry, recovery, compensation etc. At
instance level, exceptions can be single task
exception or multi task exception. Also, at instance
level, if the exception cannot be resolved by the
EHP, a new variant for the exception raising case
may be created. This can be achieved by
collaboration between the EHP and the workflow
definition peer where the new variant will be stored.
In case of process evolution, the current running
cases will be tackled either with a proceeding
approach or with a transferring approach. In the
proceeding approach, each case is referred to a
specific version of workflow process. Newer
versions do not affect old cases and the number of
versions should be kept to minimum. In the
transferring approach, existing cases are transferred
to the new process so they can directly benefit from
evolutionary changes. The EHP can acquire some
knowledge from previous exceptions, which may be
achieved by applying AI techniques. Initially Case
Based reasoning will be applied to this problem.
The EHP is provided with a Case Based
Reasoning (CBR) unit to handle exceptions which
need to be managed in similar way, but may occur in
AN ADAPTIVE P2P WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEM - Flexibility and Exception Handling Support in P2P
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431
different instances. This consideration suggests that
previous experience in exception handling can be
reused for different workflows. This can be
achieved by using CBR in exceptional problem
solving. CBR is an artificial intelligent technique
which can be defined as the process of solving new
problems based on the solutions of similar past
problems.
Luo, et al. (2003) describe a workflow system
which uses CBR scheme to derive patterns from
exception handling. Then, the similarity is
determined to identify the nearest pattern in the
knowledge base to the current exception and
applying the appropriate action for this case. User
intervention is allowed to handle new cases or
defining a new action for a specific case. CBR
added great value to the exception handling in
workflow as the CBR system collects more cases;
the WFMS becomes more resistant because it has a
large set of knowledge to handle future exceptions
(Cardoso et al., 2001). Luo et al. (2003) use CBR for
exception handling in cross-organisational workflow
where the coordination is among different workflow
management systems in different organisations.
However, in P2P based workflow the coordination is
among nodes within the same organisation. One
goal of this research is to apply CBR in a P2P based
workflow management system at instance level
using an exception handling peer. The use of CBR
includes: case retrieval, case adaptation, case
analysis and verification and case reuse.
4 A CASE STUDY
To better illustrate how the proposed adaptive P2P
workflow management system described in the
previous section works, an example of a motor
insurance claim process is presented. The process
consists of 8 tasks as shown in Figure 4. The tasks
will be distributed over the workflow peers and their
workflow participants, based on the roles of the
participants themselves and structure of the
organisation. To examine the system, both build-
time and run-time functions are implemented.
Build-time function implementation includes:
(1) Modelling the process using a graphical notation
using the Workflow Definition Peer (Figure 4).
(2) Partitioning the process into tasks according to
the roles of the workflow participants and the
organisational structure of the insurance
company.
(3) Creation of Workflow Peers corresponding to the
model of task distribution.
(4) Distribution and initialisation of tasks to the
relevant Workflow Peers using the P2P network.
T2
Check
Policy
T3
Check
Premium
T4
Assess
Claim
T5
Arrange
Viewing
T7
Make
Payment
Claim
Rejected
T8
Close
File
T6
Reassess
Claim
OR
T1
Get
Claim
Figure 4: Example insurance claim process.
After the Build-Time functions are completed,
the system can carry out its Run-time functions.
These will include:
(1) Instantiating a workflow instance and
coordination of tasks by message exchange
between peers.
(2) Making ad-hoc changes to the running instances
and examining the exception handling
procedures.
(3) Handling the exception raising instance, and
generating a process variant.
(4) Evolving the workflow process and establishing
a versioning mechanism for the current and old
instances.
Initial prototyping of the system has been carried
out using JBoss jBPM. XPDL (XML Process
Definition Languages) is currently being used for
process definition as it offers portability between
different Process Design tools. The P2P network
environment of this prototype is based on Sun
MicroSystem’s JXTA (http://www.jxta.org/).
5 CONCLUSIONS
This paper presented an adaptive P2P workflow
management system. The main components of the
architecture of this system are: workflow definition
peer, workflow peers, administration peer, exception
handling peer and a P2P networking infrastructure.
The proposed system will, at run-time, work in two
modes; Normal mode and Exception handling mode.
In normal mode the process enactment is performed
by the direct communication and collaboration
amongst peers. However, in the exception handling
mode, the exception handling peer will control and
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synchronise between the workflow peers affected by
the exception in order to resolve the problem. The
latter case makes the system work in Hybrid
Centralised/P2P environment with some level of
control from a single node.
This adaptive P2P approach provides more
flexibility in dealing with exceptions at instance
level using an intelligent exception handling peer.
The exception handling peer can acquire knowledge
from previous experience to deal with new
exceptions using case based reasoning. This peer
interacts with the workflow peers individually, so
only the peer which is affected by the current
exception or ad-hoc change will be suspended.
Currently work has been carried out developing a
single Workflow Peer, using JBoss jBPM. JXTA
has been identified as a good candidate for the P2P
network protocol and work will now concentrate on
distributing the tasks among the Workflow Peers.
Further evaluation of the architecture, consisting of
both research and experimental analysis, will
include: completion of the underlying P2P
workflow architecture and its application to a
number of workflow problems; development and
evaluation of a framework for handling various
exceptions at instance level; developing a CBR
module for the Exception Handling Peer.
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