Enabling pervasive execution of workflows

As opposed to existing workflow management systems, the distributed execution of workflows in pervasive environments can not rely on centralized control. The dynamic nature of the pervasive environments on the other hand does not allow a permanent assignment of roles to devices. In this paper, we suggest an architecture supporting distributed execution of workflows in pervasive environments based on a fully decentralized control and dynamic assignment of roles to devices. The architecture is defined in terms of data structures associated with the workflow execution plan and dynamic information, a protocol for the exchange of the workflow data among devices and a new function called role discovery dealing with the dynamic assignment of roles to devices. This architecture is applied in the context of Web services using BPEL as workflow description language.