Towards a scalable framework for artifact-centric business process management systems

Abstract

Over the last decade we have witnessed the success of artifact-centric approach in business process management (BPM). However the scalability issue was neglected by almost all its implementation frameworks. A non-scalable framework will severely hamper applicability of corresponding artifact-centric BPM systems in large-scale applications. Considering distinct characteristics of the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style we propose a distributed artifactcentric BPM framework based on REST principles. A prototype is developed using Docker-based micro services for continuously delivering of process engine instances. Through extensive experiments against a typical process-aware application we confirm that the proposed framework is promising to support scalable artifact-centric BPM systems.