Approaches on Getting Workflow Task Execution Number of Times

Cloud computing has generated significant interest in the business processing community, where workflow process in a business context can be organized by integrating web-based services or hosted activities. The budget for capital expenses and operating expenses on cloud computing based workflow systems can be made previous the real deployment when expenses of involved tasks (cloud services) and expected task execution number of times (expnum) are available. To get expnum, we propose two approaches, which are flow-balance and divide-and-conquer. We also analyze workflow control-flow patterns to help in getting expnum. Case study and simulations have verified the ability of our approaches.