Workflow

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

Flexible and Efficient Workflow Deployment of Data-Intensive Applications On Grids With MOTEUR

Abstract: Workflows offer a powerful way to describe and deploy applications on grid infrastructures. Many workflow management systems have been proposed but there is still a lack of a system that would allow both a simple description of the dataflow of the application and an efficient execution on a grid platform. In this paper, we study the requirements of such a system, underlining the need for well-defined data composition strategies on the one hand and for a fully parallel execution on the other. As combining those features is not straightforward, we then propose algorithms to do so and we describe the design and implementation of MOTEUR, a workflow engine that fulfills those requirements. Performance results and overhead quantification are shown to evaluate MOTEUR with respect to existing comparable workflow systems on a production grid.

Triana: a graphical Web service composition and execution toolkit

Abstract: Service composition refers to the aggregation of services to build complex applications to achieve client requirements. It is an important challenge to make it possible for users to construct complex workflows transparently and thereby insulating them from the complexity of interacting with numerous heterogeneous services. We present an extension to the Triana PSE to facilitate graphical Web service discovery, composition and invocation. Our framework has several novel features which distinguish it from other work in this area. First, users can graphically create complex service compositions. Second, Triana allows the user to share the composite service as a BPELAWS graph or expose it as a service in a one-click manner. Third, Triana allows the user to easily carry out "what-if" analysis by altering existing workflows. Fourth, Triana allows the user to record provenance data for a workflow. Finally, our framework allows the user to execute the composed graph on a Grid or P2P network. Triana is a part of the GridLab and GridOneD projects and is used in the GEO 600 project.

Method and apparatus for dynamic optimization of business processes managed by a computer system

Abstract: The invention relates to a method and a device for the dynamic optimization of business processes, the business process instances of a business process being managed by a workflow management computer system. The invention is in particular characterized by collecting, investigating and storing parameters, processing data and result data, and subsequently optimizing business processes on the basis of stored information by identifying a business process instance having propitious result data, modifying the parameters of said instance and subsequent verification of such modification. The invention is further characterized by the use of genetic algorithms and orthogonal matrices for the modification of the parameters of the identified business process instance with propitious result data. The invention is suitable for being used in the process optimization in production engineering and plant engineering and in process optimization in the service field.

Flexible Support of Team Processes by Adaptive Workflow Systems

Abstract: Process-oriented support of collaborative work is an important challenge today. At first glance, Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) seem to be very suitable tools for realizing team-work processes. However, such processes have to be frequently adapted, e.g., due to process optimizations or when process goals change. Unfortunately, runtime adaptability still seems to be an unsolvable problem for almost all existing WfMS. Usually, process changes can be accomplished by modifying a corresponding (graphical) workflow (WF) schema. Especially for long-running processes, however, it is extremely important that such changes can be propagated to already running WF instances as well, but without causing inconsistencies and errors. The paper presents a general and comprehensive correctness criterion for ensuring compliance of in-progress WF instances with a modified WF schema. For different kinds of WF schema changes, it is precisely stated, which rules and which information are needed at mininum for satisfying this criterion.