A Decentralised Architecture for Workflow Support

In the past few years, the traditional client/server architecture for workflow has exhibited many weaknesses, as such an architecture seriously degrades system performance, greatly lacks scalability in a dynamic environment and rigidly restricts human beings. Unfortunately, current research only partly addressed the above difficulties and the problems are still unsolved. In this paper, an innovative, decentralised workflow architecture named as SwinDew, is proposed, which applies p2p concepts to workflow scenarios and decentralises both data and control. With this approach, each node within the system acts as a client application and performs functions of a data repository and a workflow engine as well. The advantages of this approach are increased resilience to failure, enhanced scalability and release of users from restrictions.