A Service-based Enactment Engine for Dynamically Reconfigurable Workflows

This paper proposes an extension of PN-Engine, a decentralized service-based engine for the enactment of workflows, that adds support for dynamic reconfiguration. A new version of a workflow can be deployed for execution on the engine without requiring the stopping/removal of older workflow instances that are still running. Backward compatibility is ensured by a simple yet effective versioning mechanism. PN-Engine, is able to manage theexecution of workflow models specified by Petri nets (PNs). The absence of a centralized control entity gives a natural support to concurrency and nondeterminism aspects of PNs. Advantages of dynamic reconfiguration are shown by an example concerning a workflow for a wine-production process.