Modeling Quality of Service for Workflows and Web Service Processes

TLDR

Workflow management systems have supported business processes for over a decade, and in e‑commerce and web‑service contexts they must capture QoS contracts—such as deadlines, quality, and cost—to ensure organizational success. This work introduces a predictive QoS model that automatically computes workflow quality from atomic task QoS attributes. The authors define a QoS specification model and provide an algorithm and simulation system to compute, analyze, and monitor workflow QoS metrics.

Abstract

Workflow management systems (WfMSs) have been used to support various types of business processes for more than a decade now. In workflows for e-commerce and Web service applications, suppliers and customers define a binding agreement or contract between the two parties, specifying Quality of Service (QoS) items such as products or services to be delivered, deadlines, quality of products, and cost of services. The management of QoS metrics directly impacts the success of organizations participating in e-commerce. Therefore, when services or products are created or managed using workflows, the underlying workflow system must accept the specifications and be able to estimate, monitor, and control the QoS rendered to customers. In this paper, we present a predictive QoS model that makes it possible to compute the quality of service for workflows automatically based on atomic task QoS attributes. To this end, we present a model that specifies QoS and describe an algorithm and a simulation system in order to compute, analyze and monitor workflow QoS metrics.