Deployment of service-based processes in the cloud using petri net decomposition

Abstract

Cloud Computing is a new distributed computing paradigm that consist in provisioning of infrastructure, software and platform resources as services. Platform services are limited to proprietary or specific programming frameworks and APIs. This issue is not adequate for the deployment of service-based processes which are likely to be composed of a diverse and heterogeneous set of services. In this paper, we propose a new approach to provision appropriate platform resources in order to deploy service-based processes in existing Cloud platforms. Our approach consists in slicing a given process to deploy into a set of elementary services through a Petri net decomposition approach. Source codes of obtained services are generated. After that, the services are packaged in our already developed service micro-containers and deployed in any target PaaS. For the slicing, we defined algorithms to slice their correspondent Petri net into a set of dependent WF-nets and to determine the orchestration to follow for their execution. We also provided the proof of preservation of initial business process semantics when executing the WF-nets. To illustrate and show the feasibility of our proposition, we provide a realistic use case scenario, i.e. Shop process deployment in Cloud Foundry PaaS.