Robust Execution of Service Workflows Using Redundancy and Advance Reservations
OA Location
Author(s)
Stein, S
Payne, T
Jennings, N
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
In this paper, we develop a novel algorithm that allows service consumers to execute business processes (or workflows) of interdependent services in a dependable manner within tight time-constraints. In particular, we consider large inter-organisational service-oriented systems, where services are offered by external organisations that demand financial remuneration and where their use has to be negotiated in advance using explicit service-level agreements (as is common in Grids and cloud computing). Here, different providers often offer the same type of service at varying levels of quality and price. Furthermore, some providers may be less trustworthy than others, possibly failing to meet their agreements. To control this unreliability and ensure end-to-end dependability while maximising the profit obtained from completing a business process, our algorithm automatically selects the most suitable providers. Moreover, unlike existing work, it reasons about the dependability properties of a workflow, and it controls these by using service redundancy for critical tasks and by planning for contingencies. Finally, our algorithm reserves services for only parts of its workflow at any time, in order to retain flexibility when failures occur. We show empirically that our algorithm consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving up to a 35-fold increase in profit and successfully completing most workflows, even when the majority of providers fail.
Date Issued
2010-10-28
Date Acceptance
2010-10-28
Citation
IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, 2010, 4 (2), pp.125-139
ISSN
1939-1374
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Start Page
125
End Page
139
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Transactions on Services Computing
Volume
4
Issue
2
Copyright Statement
© 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Identifier
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268519/
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Computer Science, Information Systems
Computer Science, Software Engineering
Computer Science
COMPUTER SCIENCE, INFORMATION SYSTEMS
COMPUTER SCIENCE, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Business process dependability
managing and adaptively controlling end-to-end dependability properties
managing
establishing
assessing interorganizational trust relationships
WEB SERVICES
SYSTEMS
TRUST
0803 Computer Software
0805 Distributed Computing
0806 Information Systems
Publication Status
Published