On Secure Workflow Decentralisation on the Internet

Decentralised workflow management systems are a new research area, where most work to-date has focused on the system's overall architecture. As little attention has been given to the security aspects in such systems, we follow a security driven approach, and consider, from the perspective of available security building blocks, how security can be implemented and what new opportunities are presented when empowering the decentralised environment with modern distributed security protocols. Our research is motivated by a more general question of how to combine the positive enablers that email exchange enjoys, with the general benefits of workflow systems, and more specifically with the benefits that can be introduced in a decentralised environment. This aims to equip email users with a set of tools to manage the semantics of a message exchange, contents, participants and their roles in the exchange in an environment that provides inherent assurances of security and privacy. This work is based on a survey of contemporary distributed security protocols, and considers how these protocols could be used in implementing a distributed workflow management system with decentralised control . We review a set of these protocols, focusing on the required message sequences in reviewing the protocols, and discuss how these security protocols provide the foundations for implementing core control-flow, data, and resource patterns in a distributed workflow environment

On the satisfiability of constraints in workflow systems

Separation of duty and binding of duty in workflow systems is an important area of current research in computer security. We introduce a formal model for constrained workflow systems that incorporate constraints for implementing such policies. We define an entailment constraint, which is defined on a pair of tasks in a work flow, and show that such constraints can be used to model many familiar authorization policies. We show that a set of entailment constraints can be manipulated algebraically in order to compute all possible dependencies between tasks in the workflow. The resulting set of constraints form the basis for an analysis of the satisfiability of a workflow. We briefly consider how this analysis can be used to implement a reference monitor for workflow systems

The BWS Open Business Enterprise System Architecture

Business process management systems play a central role in supporting the business operations of medium and large organizations. This paper analyses the properties current business enterprise systems and proposes a new application type called Open Business Enterprise Sys-tem. A new open system architecture called Business Workflow System is proposed. This ar-chitecture combines the instruments for flexible data management, business process manage-ment and integration into a flexible system able to manage modern business operations. The architecture was validated by implementing it into the DocuMentor platform used by major companies in Romania and US. These implementations offered the necessary data to create and refine an enterprise integration methodology called DM-CPI. The final section of the paper presents the concepts, stages and techniques employed by the methodology.BWL, Workflow, BWS, Evaluation, Open Business Enterprise System, DM-CPI

How Do Pharmacies Evaluate Cleanroom Automation Systems?

Many pharmacies have implemented or considered implementing cleanroom automation or compounding systems. Intravenous (IV) admixture automation is one of the newest areas of technology that has been applied to pharmacy workflow. Manufacturers tout systems for reducing errors reaching patients. Clinical literature supports that cleanroom technology can aid in patient safety

An environment for workflow applications on wide-area distributed systems

©2001 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.Workflow techniques are emerging as an important approach for the specification and management of complex processing tasks. This approach is especially powerful for utilising distributed data and processing resources in widely-distributed heterogeneous systems. We describe our DISCWorld distributed workflow environment for composing complex processing chains, which are specified as a directed acyclic graph of operators. Users of our system can formulate processing chains using either graphical or scripting tools. We have deployed our system for image processing applications and decision support systems. We describe the technologies we have developed to enable the execution of these processing chains across wide-area computing systems. In particular, we present our Distributed Job Placement Language (based on XML) and various Java interface approaches we have developed for implementing the workflow metaphor. We outline a number of key issues for implementing a high-performance, reliable, distributed workflow management system.James, H.A.; Hawick, K.A.; Coddington, P.D

Systematic investigation of methods for multiple freeform optimization in multi-lens imaging systems

With the development in freeform technology, it has now become more and more feasible to use freeform surfaces in real system designs. While the freeform surfaces helping optical designers achieve more and more challenging system features, the methods for multiple freeform implementations are still underdeveloped. We therefore investigate strategies to use freeform surfaces properly in imaging optical systems with one Scheimpflug system and one lithographic system. Based on the studies of the influences of the freeform normalization radius, freeform order and system eccentricity, the methods of determining the optimal location for implementing one freeform surface are discussed. Different optimization strategies to optimize two freeform surfaces are discussed to compare their resulting influences on the system performance. On top of that, ways to implement more than one freeform surface in the optical system is also investigated. In the end, a workflow is presented as guidance for implementing multiple freeform surfaces with respect to system aberration constitutions