xLONGWisE: An environment to support the execution of Long Running Workflows

Long Running Workflow (LRW) is a particular kind of workflow that lasts for hours, days, or even weeks to complete its execution. The long duration is directly associated to the nature of certain business processes, such as to get a home mortgage or obtain the money related to a car insurance. LRWs are usually deployed in execution environments specially designed to support their inherent characteristics such as the possibility of changes in the business rules, appropriate treatment of resources provisioning, dynamic reconfiguration and so on. Appropriate treatments for these characteristics imposes a great complexity to execution environment developers. In this context, this paper presents xLONGWisE (extended LONg runninG Workflow Execution environment), a solution specially conceived to support the execution of LRWs that adopts an elaborated mechanism to improve the dynamic reconfiguration aspect. The solution analyzes the execution of the workflow that is in progress, the changes that should be made and, according to the identified scenario, it uses different reconfiguration strategies to apply those changes. In order to evaluate xLONGWisE, an experiment related to the scenario of a real health insurance organization was carried and demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed solution.