Automatic fragment identification in workflows based on sharing analysis

Abstract

In Service-Oriented Computing (SOC), fragmentation and merging of workflows are motivated by a number of concerns, among which we can cite design issues, performance, and privacy. Fragmentation emphasizes the application of design and runtime methods for clustering workflow activities into fragments and for checking the correctness of such fragment identification w.r.t. to some predefined policy. We present a fragment identification approach based on sharing analysis and we show how it can be applied to abstract workflow representations that may include descriptions of data operations, logical link dependencies based on logical formulas, and complex control flow constructs, such as loops and branches. Activities are assigned to fragments (to infer how these fragments are made up or to check their well-formedness) by interpreting the sharing information obtained from the analysis according to a set of predefined policy constraints. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.