Workflow

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

Inter-enterprise collaborative business process management

Abstract: Conventional workflow systems are primarily designed for intra-enterprise process management, and they are hardly used to handle processes with tasks and data separated by enterprise boundaries, for reasons such as security, privacy, sharability, firewalls, etc. Further, the cooperation of multiple enterprises is often based on peer-to-peer interactions rather than centralized coordination. As a result, the conventional centralized process management architecture does not fit into the picture of inter-enterprise business-to-business e-commerce. We have developed a Collaborative Process Manager (CPM) to support decentralized, peer-to-peer process management for inter-enterprise collaboration at the business process level. A collaborative process is not handled by a centralized workflow engine, but by multiple CPMs, each representing a player in the business process. Each CPM is used to schedule, dispatch and control the tasks of the process that the player is responsible for, and the CPMs interoperate through an inter-CPM messaging protocol. We have implemented CPM and embedded it into a dynamic software agent architecture, E-Carry, that we developed at HP Labs, to elevate multi-agent cooperation from the conversation level to the process level for mediating e-commerce applications.

Systems, methods and user interfaces for document workflow construction

Abstract: Context sensitive drag-and-drop systems, methods and user interfaces are provided in a Graphical User Interface (GUI) computing environment. Icons representing various tasks may be interactively drag-and-dropped to an adjoining graphically-based workspace in a context-based task-drop location to simply and intuitively construct a graphically-based workflow solution. A collapsible error handling failure branch may be constructed concurrently with the main branch of the workflow process. A loopback path to a higher branch may optionally be constructed for the failure branch. The workflow solution may be applied in a document printing environment for document production, a document copying environment, or an accounting environment, for example, for clear and efficient generation of workflows.

Montage: A grid enabled engine for delivering custom science-grade mosaics on demand

Abstract: This paper describes the design of a grid-enabled version of Montage, an astronomical image mosaic service, suitable for large scale processing of the sky. All the re-projection jobs can be added to a pool of tasks and performed by as many processors as are available, exploiting the parallelization inherent in the Montage architecture. We show how we can describe the Montage application in terms of an abstract workflow so that a planning tool such as Pegasus can derive an executable workflow that can be run in the Grid environment. The execution of the workflow is performed by the workflow manager DAGMan and the associated Condor-G. The grid processing will support tiling of images to a manageable size when the input images can no longer be held in memory. Montage will ultimately run operationally on the Teragrid. We describe science applications of Montage, including its application to science product generation by Spitzer Legacy Program teams and large-scale, all-sky image processing projects.

Workflow management system

Abstract: A workflow management system is disclosed that is suitable to manage a workflow including plural hierarchically-classified tasks and especially for cooperative work spread over different organizations. The workflow management system includes a task receiving unit to receive designation of a task to be delegated, a delegatee receiving unit to receive designation of a delegatee, an acceptance receiving unit to receive acceptance of a delegation from the delegatee, a first processor that allows a delegator to hide a delegated task and a subordinate task, and allows the delegator to confirm status of the designated task, and a second processor that allows the delegator to refer to other tasks relevant to the delegated tasks.