Workflow

About: Workflow is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 31996 publications have been published within this topic receiving 498339 citations.

The specification and enforcement of authorization constraints in workflow management systems

Abstract: In recent years, workflow management systems (WFMSs) have gained popularity in both research and commercial sectors WFMSs are used to coordinate and streamline business processes Very large WFMSs are often used in organizations with users in the range of several thousands and process instances in the range of tens and thousands To simplify the complexity of security administration, it is common practice in many businesses to allocate a role for each activity in the process and then assign one or more users to each role—granting an authorization to roles rather than to users Typically, security policies are expressed as constraints (or rules) on users and roles; separation of duties is a well-known constraint Unfortunately, current role-based access control models are not adequate to model such constraints To address this issue we (1) present a language to express both static and dynamic authorization constraints as clauses in a logic program; (2) provide formal notions of constraint consistency; and (3) propose algorithms to check the consistency of constraints and assign users and roles to tasks that constitute the workflow in such a way that no constraints are violated

Human-robot interaction in rescue robotics

Abstract: Rescue robotics has been suggested by a recent DARPA/NSF study as an application domain for the research in human-robot integration (HRI). This paper provides a short tutorial on how robots are currently used in urban search and rescue (USAR) and discusses the HRI issues encountered over the past eight years. A domain theory of the search activity is formulated. The domain theory consists of two parts: 1) a workflow model identifying the major tasks, actions, and roles in robot-assisted search (e.g., a workflow model) and 2) a general information flow model of how data from the robot is fused by various team members into information and knowledge. The information flow model also captures the types of situation awareness needed by each agent in the rescue robot system. The article presents a synopsis of the major HRI issues in reducing the number of humans it takes to control a robot, maintaining performance with geographically distributed teams with intermittent communications, and encouraging acceptance within the existing social structure.

Characterization of scientific workflows

Abstract: Researchers working on the planning, scheduling and execution of scientific workflows need access to a wide variety of scientific workflows to evaluate the performance of their implementations. We describe basic workflow structures that are composed into complex workflows by scientific communities. We provide a characterization of workflows from five diverse scientific applications, describing their composition and data and computational requirements. We also describe the effect of the size of the input datasets on the structure and execution profiles of these workflows. Finally, we describe a workflow generator that produces synthetic, parameterizable workflows that closely resemble the workflows that we characterize. We make these workflows available to the community to be used as benchmarks for evaluating various workflow systems and scheduling algorithms.

A taxonomy of scientific workflow systems for grid computing

Abstract: 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. 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.