A Flexible Approach for Automatic Process Decentralization Using Dependency Tables

Web service paradigm and related technologies have provided favorable means for the realization of collaborative business processes. From both conceptual and implementation points of view, the business processes are based on a centralized management approach. Nevertheless, it is very well known that the enterprise-wide process management where processes may span multiple organizational units requires particular considerations on scalability, heterogeneity, availability and privacy issues, that in turn, require particular consideration on decentralization. In this paper, our aim is to reconcile the decentralization of processes as a step towards the enterprise-wide solutions. We propose a methodology for transforming a centralized process specification into a form that is amenable to a distributed execution and to incorporate the necessary synchronization between different processing entities. The proposed technique has the advantage of being flexible that it computes the abstract constructs and provides a generalized approach to the decentralization of processes.