Temporal Verification for Business Cloud Workflows: Open Research Issues

In recent years, cloud computing is establishing itself as the latest high-performance and high-throughput computing paradigm, and thus doing business in the cloud is becoming a reality. However, due to the dynamic nature of the cloud environment, the on-time completion of time-constrained business workflows is a big challenge. Workflow temporal verification as the major approach to monitor and control the correctness of temporal consistency plays a critical role in the on-time completion of business workflow instances. In the recent decade, great efforts have been dedicated to the area of workflow temporal verification and it is high time that we should define the key research issues for business cloud workflows in order to keep our research on the right track. In this paper, we systematically investigate this problem and propose four key research issues based on the introduction of a generic temporal verification framework. Meanwhile, some preliminary solutions and open challenges are presented and discussed. Finally, Swin DeW-V, an on-going research project on temporal verification as part of our Swin DeW-C cloud workflow system, is also demonstrated.