Towards a highly scalable architecture for workflow management systems

Workflow management is aimed at the execution of business processes within an enterprise. Workflow management systems (WfMSs) build an execution platform for business processes in organizations of any size and structure. Performance is an important criteria for the applicability of WfMSs; they have to be scalable to varying load situations. The authors present a modular logical WfMS architecture, which is the basis for configuring the WfMS according to the performance needs of the application environment. Based on this logical architecture they define a data partitioning and replication scheme which allows to replicate and distribute components of the WfMS without raising synchronization efforts. As a consequence, the proposed physical architecture provides scalability.