An Architecture for Decentralised Orchestration of Web Service Workflows

Abstract

Service-oriented workflows are typically executed using a centralised orchestration approach that presents significant scalability challenges. These challenges include the consumption of network bandwidth, degradation of performance, and single-points of failure. We provide a decentralised orchestration architecture that attempts to address these challenges. Our architecture adopts a design model that permits the computation to be moved "closer" to services in a workflow. This is achieved by partitioning workflows specified using our simple dataflow language into smaller fragments, which may be sent to remote locations for execution.

To appear in Proceedings of the IEEE 20th International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2013)