A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

Adaptive Process Management in Cyber-Physical Domains

The increasing application of process-oriented approaches in new challenging cyber-physical domains beyond business computing (e.g., personalized healthcare, emergency management, factories of the future, home automation, etc.) has led to reconsider the level of flexibility and support required to manage complex processes in such domains. A cyber-physical domain is characterized by the presence of a cyber-physical system coordinating heterogeneous ICT components (PCs, smartphones, sensors, actuators) and involving real world entities (humans, machines, agents, robots, etc.) that perform complex tasks in the “physical” real world to achieve a common goal. The physical world, however, is not entirely predictable, and processes enacted in cyber-physical domains must be robust to unexpected conditions and adaptable to unanticipated exceptions. This demands a more flexible approach in process design and enactment, recognizing that in real-world environments it is not adequate to assume that all possible recovery activities can be predefined for dealing with the exceptions that can ensue. In this chapter, we tackle the above issue and we propose a general approach, a concrete framework and a process management system implementation, called SmartPM, for automatically adapting processes enacted in cyber-physical domains in case of unanticipated exceptions and exogenous events. The adaptation mechanism provided by SmartPM is based on declarative task specifications, execution monitoring for detecting failures and context changes at run-time, and automated planning techniques to self-repair the running process, without requiring to predefine any specific adaptation policy or exception handler at design-time

Supporting adaptiveness of cyber-physical processes through action-based formalisms

Cyber Physical Processes (CPPs) refer to a new generation of business processes enacted in many application environments (e.g., emergency management, smart manufacturing, etc.), in which the presence of Internet-of-Things devices and embedded ICT systems (e.g., smartphones, sensors, actuators) strongly influences the coordination of the real-world entities (e.g., humans, robots, etc.) inhabitating such environments. A Process Management System (PMS) employed for executing CPPs is required to automatically adapt its running processes to anomalous situations and exogenous events by minimising any human intervention. In this paper, we tackle this issue by introducing an approach and an adaptive Cognitive PMS, called SmartPM, which combines process execution monitoring, unanticipated exception detection and automated resolution strategies leveraging on three well-established action-based formalisms developed for reasoning about actions in Artificial Intelligence (AI), including the situation calculus, IndiGolog and automated planning. Interestingly, the use of SmartPM does not require any expertise of the internal working of the AI tools involved in the system

Semantically Resolving Type Mismatches in Scientific Workflows

Scientists are increasingly utilizing Grids to manage large data sets and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Scientific workflows are used as means for modeling and enacting scientific experiments. Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is a major component of Microsoft’s .NET technology which offers lightweight support for long-running workflows. It provides a comfortable graphical and programmatic environment for the development of extended BPEL-style workflows. WF’s visual features ease the syntactic composition of Web services into scientific workflows but do nothing to assure that information passed between services has consistent semantic types or representations or that deviant flows, errors and compensations are handled meaningfully. In this paper we introduce SAWSDL-compliant annotations for WF and use them with a semantic reasoner to guarantee semantic type correctness in scientific workflows. Examples from bioinformatics are presented

Two Case Studies of Subsystem Design for General-Purpose CSCW Software Architectures

This paper discusses subsystem design guidelines for the software architecture of general-purpose computer supported cooperative work systems, i.e., systems that are designed to be applicable in various application areas requiring explicit collaboration support. In our opinion, guidelines for subsystem level design are rarely given most guidelines currently given apply to the programming language level. We extract guidelines from a case study of the redesign and extension of an advanced commercial workflow management system and place them into the context of existing software engineering research. The guidelines are then validated against the design decisions made in the construction of a widely used web-based groupware system. Our approach is based on the well-known distinction between essential (logical) and physical architectures. We show how essential architecture design can be based on a direct mapping of abstract functional concepts as found in general-purpose systems to modules in the essential architecture. The essential architecture is next mapped to a physical architecture by applying software clustering and replication to achieve the required distribution and performance characteristics

Distributed aspect-oriented service composition for business compliance governance with public service processes

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) offers a technical foundation for Enterprise Application Integration and business collaboration through service-based business components. With increasing process outsourcing and cloud computing, enterprises need process-level integration and collaboration (process-oriented) to quickly launch new business processes for new customers and products. However, business processes that cross organisations’ compliance regulation boundaries are still unaddressed. We introduce a distributed aspect-oriented service composition approach, which enables multiple process clients hot-plugging their business compliance models (business rules, fault handling policy, and execution monitor) to BPEL business processes

McRunjob: A High Energy Physics Workflow Planner for Grid Production Processing

McRunjob is a powerful grid workflow manager used to manage the generation of large numbers of production processing jobs in High Energy Physics. In use at both the DZero and CMS experiments, McRunjob has been used to manage large Monte Carlo production processing since 1999 and is being extended to uses in regular production processing for analysis and reconstruction. Described at CHEP 2001, McRunjob converts core metadata into jobs submittable in a variety of environments. The powerful core metadata description language includes methods for converting the metadata into persistent forms, job descriptions, multi-step workflows, and data provenance information. The language features allow for structure in the metadata by including full expressions, namespaces, functional dependencies, site specific parameters in a grid environment, and ontological definitions. It also has simple control structures for parallelization of large jobs. McRunjob features a modular design which allows for easy expansion to new job description languages or new application level tasks.Comment: CHEP 2003 serial number TUCT00

Computerization of workflows, guidelines and care pathways: a review of implementation challenges for process-oriented health information systems

There is a need to integrate the various theoretical frameworks and formalisms for modeling clinical guidelines, workflows, and pathways, in order to move beyond providing support for individual clinical decisions and toward the provision of process-oriented, patient-centered, health information systems (HIS). In this review, we analyze the challenges in developing process-oriented HIS that formally model guidelines, workflows, and care pathways. A qualitative meta-synthesis was performed on studies published in English between 1995 and 2010 that addressed the modeling process and reported the exposition of a new methodology, model, system implementation, or system architecture. Thematic analysis, principal component analysis (PCA) and data visualisation techniques were used to identify and cluster the underlying implementation ‘challenge’ themes. One hundred and eight relevant studies were selected for review. Twenty-five underlying ‘challenge’ themes were identified. These were clustered into 10 distinct groups, from which a conceptual model of the implementation process was developed. We found that the development of systems supporting individual clinical decisions is evolving toward the implementation of adaptable care pathways on the semantic web, incorporating formal, clinical, and organizational ontologies, and the use of workflow management systems. These architectures now need to be implemented and evaluated on a wider scale within clinical settings