Node-RED Workflow Manager for Edge Service Orchestration

Abstract

Microservice Architectures have increasingly become popular in Industry 4.0 as they allow heterogeneous systems to interact, reduce the complexity in the management of individual components, and support distributed deployments. The integration of those distributed services into orchestrated production processes is performed by workflow managers. Next generation workflow managers must overcome a number of challenges when operating in microservice architectures and IoT environments. To overcome these challenges (heterogeneity, high dynamism, edge deployment or scalability), we propose a workflow manager alternative built in Node-RED. Node-RED provides instruments for the development of IoT systems and leverages the edge computing paradigm. This solution is deployable in embedded systems, is able to load and execute business processes by means of BPMN recipes and enables the integration of other frameworks and architectures.