A Distributed Execution Environment for Large Scale Work ow Management Systems with Subnets and Server Migration

If the number of users within a work ow management system WFMS increases a central work ow server WF server and a single local area network LAN may become overloaded The approach describes an execution environment which is able to manage a growing number of users by adding new servers and subnets The basic idea is to decompose processes into parts which are controlled by di erent WF servers That is during execution of a work ow instance its execution step control may migrate from one WF server to another By select ing the appropriate physical servers for hosting the WF servers in the appropriate LANs communication costs and individual WF server workload can be reduced signi cantly