A Distributed Discovery of Communicating Resource Systems Models

Abstract

In communicating resource systems (CRS), a set of independent, hierarchically composed resources communicate to realize a business process. Examples of CRSs include RESTful Web services, cloud computing platforms and hierarchical distributed systems. Unfortunately, their complexity, distributed nature, and usually long lifespan can lead to problems like livelocks, deadlock occurrences and invocation loops. This makes CRSs hard to maintain and manage; it also leads to a loss of QoS or system failures. Moreover, it is important to take into account, in system management, the exact way how the system gets to some desired or undesired state. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze processes, executed in a system to find and fix the above problems. Unfortunately, CRS process models are hardly ever available. Therefore, we present a new distributed algorithm, dRMA, discovering process models from CRS event logs. In order to reduce the representational bias between the discovered process model and the real process, we have defined a Communication Net, which can express features of CRSs: directed communication channels, hierarchy, and a resource perspective. Finally, we have evaluated dRMA on a cluster, and have showed that distributing jobs can significantly reduce the time of process model discovery.