Scientific Workflows: Past, Present and Future

International audienceThis special issue and our editorial celebrate 10 years of progress with data-intensive or scientific workflows. There have been very substantial advances in the representation of workflows and in the engineering of workflow management systems (WMS). The creation and refinement stages are now well supported, with a significant improvement in usability. Improved abstraction supports cross-fertilisation between different workflow communities and consistent interpretation as WMS evolve. Through such re-engineering the WMS deliver much improved performance, significantly increased scale and sophisticated reliability mechanisms. Further improvement is anticipated from substantial advances in optimisation. We invited papers from those who have delivered these advances and selected 14 to represent today's achievements and representative plans for future progress. This editorial introduces those contributions with an overview and categorisation of the papers. Furthermore, it elucidates responses from a survey of major workflow systems, which provides evidence of substantial progress and a structured index of related papers. We conclude with suggestions on areas where further research and development is needed and offer a vision of future research directions

Human Resource Management in Emergency Situations

The dissertation examines the issues related to the human resource management in emergency situations and introduces the measures helping to solve these issues. The prime aim is to analyse complexly a human resource management, built environment resilience management life cycle and its stages for the purpose of creating an effective Human Resource Management in Emergency Situations Model and Intelligent System. This would help in accelerating resilience in every stage, managing personal stress and reducing disaster-related losses. The dissertation consists of an Introduction, three Chapters, the Conclusions, References, List of Author’s Publications and nine Appendices. The introduction discusses the research problem and the research relevance, outlines the research object, states the research aim and objectives, overviews the research methodology and the original contribution of the research, presents the practical value of the research results, and lists the defended propositions. The introduction concludes with an overview of the author’s publications and conference presentations on the topic of this dissertation. Chapter 1 introduces best practice in the field of disaster and resilience management in the built environment. It also analyses disaster and resilience management life cycle ant its stages, reviews different intelligent decision support systems, and investigates researches on application of physiological parameters and their dependence on stress. The chapter ends with conclusions and the explicit objectives of the dissertation. Chapter 2 of the dissertation introduces the conceptual model of human resource management in emergency situations. To implement multiple criteria analysis of the research object the methods of multiple criteria analysis and mahematics are proposed. They should be integrated with intelligent technologies. In Chapter 3 the model developed by the author and the methods of multiple criteria analysis are adopted by developing the Intelligent Decision Support System for a Human Resource Management in Emergency Situations consisting of four subsystems: Physiological Advisory Subsystem to Analyse a User’s Post-Disaster Stress Management; Text Analytics Subsystem; Recommender Thermometer for Measuring the Preparedness for Resilience and Subsystem of Integrated Virtual and Intelligent Technologies. The main statements of the thesis were published in eleven scientific articles: two in journals listed in the Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science, one in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, four in peer-reviewed conference proceedings referenced in the Thomson Reuters ISI database, and three in peer-reviewed conference proceedings in Lithuania. Five presentations were given on the topic of the dissertation at conferences in Lithuania and other countries