Distributed Resource Management in Workflow Environments

摘要

Workflow processes involve the coordinated execution of tasks performed by (local or remote) work-flow resources (e.g., person, a computer-based application, a printer). Workflow resource management is concerned with keeping track of resource status and assigning available resources to workflow tasks. Traditional approaches either manage distributed resources globally at a central site incurring huge overhead to keep track of resource status, or manage resources locally resulting in long delays at run time resource assignment. In this paper, we describe a distributed resource management approach that addresses above problems. We introduce the concept of two-step resource assignment. Instead of doing resource assignment in one step either at a central site (in global management approach) or at remote sites (in local management approach), the proposed approach first checks at central site the availability of resource groups, and then selects at remote sites specific resources from the group. A resource group is a group of resources that all can perform certain tasks. It is much easier to keep track of the status of resource groups (e.g., at least some printers are available at a site) than that of individual resources. In the paper, we discuss specification of resource group and their relationships to individual resources. In this paper, we discuss specification of resource group and their relationships to individual resources. We also discuss propagation of individual resource status to resource groups at remote sites. We describe such an implementation in the context of HP OpenPM workflow management system.