Workflow

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

Choreographing Web Services

Abstract: This paper introduces the multiagent protocols (MAP) Web service choreography language and demonstrates how service choreographies can be specified, verified, and enacted with a comparatively simple process language. MAP is a directly executable specification, services do not have to be preconfigured at design-time. Instead, a choreography, specified in MAP, can be sent dynamically to a group of distributed peers to execute at runtime. Furthermore, MAP is based on a formal foundation, this allows model checking of the choreography definition prior to live distribution and enactment. A motivating scenario, taken from the AstroGrid science use-cases, serves as the focal point for the paper and highlights the benefits of choreography, through data flow optimization and lack of centralized server. The MAP formal syntax and model checking environment are discussed in the context of the motivating scenario, along with MagentA, an implementation of MAP which provides a concrete, and open-source framework for the enactment of distributed choreographies. MAP is evaluated by demonstrating the languages conformance to the service interaction patterns, a collection of 13 recurring workflow patterns.

Mining staff assignment rules from event-based data

Abstract: Process mining offers methods and techniques for capturing process behaviour from log data of past process executions. Although many promising approaches on mining the control flow have been published, no attempt has been made to mine the staff assignment situation of business processes. In this paper, we introduce the problem of mining staff assignment rules using history data and organisational information (e.g., an organisational model) as input. We show that this task can be considered an inductive learning problem and adapt a decision tree learning approach to derive staff assignment rules. In contrast to rules acquired by traditional techniques (e.g., questionnaires) the thus derived rules are objective and show the staff assignment situation at hand. Therefore, they can help to better understand the process. Moreover, the rules can be used as input for further analysis, e.g., workload balance analysis or delta analysis. This paper presents the current state of our work and points out some challenges for future research.

Automatic capture and reconstruction of computational provenance

Abstract: The Earth System Science Server (ES3) project is developing a local infrastructure for managing Earth science data products derived from satellite remote sensing. By ‘local,’ we mean the infrastructure that a scientist uses to manage the creation and dissemination of her own data products, particularly those that are constantly incorporating corrections or improvements based on the scientist's own research. Therefore, in addition to being robust and capacious enough to support public access, ES3 is intended to be flexible enough to manage the idiosyncratic computing ensembles that typify scientific research. Instead of specifying provenance explicitly with a workflow model, ES3 extracts provenance information automatically from arbitrary applications by monitoring their interactions with their execution environment. These interactions (arguments, file I-O, system calls, etc.) are logged to the ES3 database, which assembles them into provenance graphs. These graphs resemble workflow specifications, but are really reports—they describe what actually happened, as opposed to what was requested. The ES3 database supports forward and backward navigation through provenance graphs (i.e. ancestor-descendant queries), as well as graph retrieval. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Workflow management system and method

Abstract: A computerized workflow management method and system to provide operational support for complex multi-step processes is disclosed. The method of workflow management involves creating an underlying database structure for recording the processing steps and other information required for each transaction, entering the necessary setup information by selection from lists of pre-stored information about processing functions, associated workflow events and milestones for the queues, mapping the data structures of the subsystem databases and the workflow management database to provide transparent interfacing and convenient manual entry of data were necessary, displaying for the user the workflow status of all transactions for which he or she is responsible, permitting menu driven initiation of required actions and automatically updating the database records for the universe of deals being managed by the system.