Workflow

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

Application of Blockchain in Collaborative Internet-of-Things Services

Abstract: Innovating business processes involves cutting-edge technologies where the Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain are technological breakthroughs. IoT is envisioned as a global network infrastructure consisting of numerous connected devices over the Internet. Many attempts have been made to improve and adapt business workflows for best utilizing IoT services. One possible solution is to digitize and automate internal processes using IoT services, in which Blockchain smart contract is a viable solution to establish the trust of process executions without intermediaries. Modern business processes are composed of disparate services; many of them tend to be delivered based on IoT. Interoperating with such services poses major challenges: 1) time for finality settlement of transactions is unpredictable and usually experiencing delay; 2) several implementations of permissioned Blockchain pose a major concern of trust regarding nodes that perform consensus; and 3) trust of process executions and IoT information is the major factor to the success of modern business processes, which require the composition of distributed IoT services. Traditional business processes are mostly managed by a single entity, which induces the problem of trust of process executions. In this paper, a smart contract for establishing the trust of process executions that fits into the IoT environment is presented. A consensus approach with selected validators extended from Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) is introduced to address time and prejudice challenges.

Fault-Tolerant Scheduling for Real-Time Scientific Workflows with Elastic Resource Provisioning in Virtualized Clouds

Abstract: Clouds are becoming an important platform for scientific workflow applications. However, with many nodes being deployed in clouds, managing reliability of resources becomes a critical issue, especially for the real-time scientific workflow execution where deadlines should be satisfied. Therefore, fault tolerance in clouds is extremely essential. The PB (primary backup) based scheduling is a popular technique for fault tolerance and has effectively been used in the cluster and grid computing. However, applying this technique for real-time workflows in a virtualized cloud is much more complicated and has rarely been studied. In this paper, we address this problem. We first establish a real-time workflow fault-tolerant model that extends the traditional PB model by incorporating the cloud characteristics. Based on this model, we develop approaches for task allocation and message transmission to ensure faults can be tolerated during the workflow execution. Finally, we propose a dynamic fault-tolerant scheduling algorithm, FASTER, for real-time workflows in the virtualized cloud. FASTER has three key features: 1) it employs a backward shifting method to make full use of the idle resources and incorporates task overlapping and VM migration for high resource utilization, 2) it applies the vertical/horizontal scaling-up technique to quickly provision resources for a burst of workflows, and 3) it uses the vertical scaling-down scheme to avoid unnecessary and ineffective resource changes due to fluctuated workflow requests. We evaluate our FASTER algorithm with synthetic workflows and workflows collected from the real scientific and business applications and compare it with six baseline algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that FASTER can effectively improve the resource utilization and schedulability even in the presence of node failures in virtualized clouds.

Wisdom of the crowd and capabilities of a few: internal success factors of crowdsourcing for innovation

Abstract: Crowdsourcing has been demonstrated to be an effective strategy to enhance the efficiency of a firm’s innovation process. In this paper, we focus on tournament-based crowdsourcing (also referred to as “broadcast search”), a method to solve technical problems in form of an open call for solutions to a large network of experts. Based on a longitudinal study of six companies piloting this application of crowdsourcing, we identify barriers and sources of resistance that hinder its implementation in firms. Our paper contributes to the state of research by analyzing crowdsourcing on the level of pilot projects, hence providing a workflow perspective that considers the creation of dedicated processes and operations of crowdsourcing. This project level analysis enables the identification of specific challenges managers face when implementing crowdsourcing within an established R&D organization. Following a design science approach, we derive suggestions for organizational interventions to overcome these barriers. We find that dedicated promoter roles strongly contribute to a successful implementation of crowdsourcing, turning pilot projects into an organizational routine.

Methods and systems for managing a virtual data center with embedded roles based access control

Abstract: Embodiments provide techniques for customers to easily, quickly and remotely manage their virtual data centers. Using, for example, a "single pane of glass" GUI view which shows all of the components (including e.g., machines (cpu and RAM), network services (load balancers, firewalls, network address translation, IP management) and storage) of their virtual data centers, provides a complete overview and a starting point for system or component management. According to embodiments, a Roles Based Access Control (RBAC) system is provided which simulates the organizational structure and workflow of a typical IT department to enable workflow management via the GUI for any component or function of a customer's virtual data center.