Execution Support to Long Running Workflows

Workflows have been widely adopted in enterprise environments to allow the formalization and automation of business processes through the execution of activities implemented by computational services. Some of these workflows, namely long running workflows, take a long time (e.g., Hours or even days and weeks) to complete their work and produce the expected results. The long execution time is inherent to the nature of some business processes, e.g., To buy a book in a bookstore using the Internet. These workflows are usually deployed at operational environments that explicitly deal with the particularities of their executions, e.g., The long time running, possibility of changes in the business rules, need of resource provisioning, security and so on. To build this kind of environment is a complex task due to the aforementioned characteristics of long running workflows. In this context, this paper presents the architecture, design and implementation of an environment specially conceived to support long running workflows. In order to evaluate the proposed environment, we carried out a performance evaluation.