Measuring the Impact of Suspension on the Process Enactment Environment during Process Evolution

Abstract : Current workflow management systems implement the ability to automatically execute predefined process models. However, processes change over time and therefore a redeployment process has to be implemented to propagate changes into the running process enactment environment. One of the necessary steps in change propagation is to suspend the current process execution. This suspension does however decrease availability of the workflow management system, increases downtime and implicitly also decreases scalability. In this paper we provide a quantification of the impact of suspension on the runtime process enactment environment and experimentally evaluate this impact, hereby providing a better insight in suspension impact. Furthermore two suspension techniques are compared and a discussion is provided in which situations, which suspension technique is beneficial.