Improving the Performance of ActiveXML Workflows: The Formal Descriptions

Modern business applications are typically required to support collaboration and coordination of several business partners. Web services have become the de facto technology for implementing such applications. One approach for specifying Web service calls and interactions is ActiveXML(AXML), a data-oriented workflow language. A problem with state-of-the-art workflow engines for AXML is that the execution is poorly optimized and thus too time-consuming.In a previous short paper, we proposed an optimization approach for workflows specified in AXML. Here, we elaborate on this proposal in more detail, providing the formal descriptions to show the general execution of the optimization rule, the algorithm to group the Web service calls, and an analytical argument for the resulting performance gain.