Decentralized Workflow Execution for Virtual Enterprises in Grid Environment

With the emergence of global market and virtual enterprises, coordination of business processes in dispersed organizations by distributed workflow execution will take on more importance. At the same time, grid workflow is now been regarded as a fundamental service in grid environment. In this paper we give a real life example to see how distributed workflow technology can be used in virtual enterprises in grid environment. We propose a novel distributed workflow execution architecture, and we also address the key technologies in implementing this architecture, i.e., the procedure of distributed process execution and the model partition method. With the real life example we demonstrate how to use the proposed method to support distributed workflow execution inside virtual enterprises. Our method can be used in many scenarios such as service oriented computing and the grid, to serve as the process management platform. We also stress that future research should focus on making further investigations on the model partition policy, i.e., how to partition the model and allocate task to different sites to improve the overall system performance