Workflow Management

Ole Christian Astrup and Espen Wøien, DNV Software, Korea...... In the business world’s race for companies to perform faster, better and cheaper, Business Process Management (BPM) and Workflow have been launched as the "Holy Grail" to success. Many of the BPM vendors are developing templates and frameworks (best practices) covering traditional industry verticals such as finance, manufacturing, telecom, and also government sectors. The marine and offshore industry is faced with the same fierce competition as the rest of the business world and must also continually improve performance. But, best practices from other industry verticals are not readily adapted to this industry segment. The workforce of the marine and offshore industries consists of highly qualified knowledge workers undertaking complex design work spanning a long time frame. Their business processes are typically concurrent, multi-discipline, iterative and highly complex. Such organisations pose severe challenges to process management and workflowimplementation supporting their best practices

(Giovanni Aloisio, Massimo Cafaro, Sandro Fiore, Maria Mirto) Center for Advanced Computational Technologies/ISUFI, National Nanotechnology Lab/INFM&CNR, Italy, {giovanni.aloisio, massimo.cafaro, sandro.fiore, maria.mirto}@unile.it.............                                                     In this paper we describe a Workflow Management System, named ProGenGrid (Proteomics and Genomics Grid, developed at the University of Lecce) which aims at providing a tool where e-scientists can simulate biological experiments through the composition of existing analysis and visualization tools, wrapped as Web Services. Since bioinformatics applications are compute- and data-intensive, needing clusters or many workstations to reduce the execution time, we exploit a Grid infrastructure for interconnecting wide-spread tools and hardware resources. As an example, we are considering some algorithms and tools needed for alignment of sequences, providing them as services, through easy to use Web interfaces and Web services built using the open source gSOAP Toolkit. As Grid middleware, we are using the Globus Toolkit 4.1, exploitingsome protocols such as GSI and GridFTP

1)Christopher W Harrop,NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Global Systems Division            2)Ligia Bernardet, 1NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Global Systems Division,Systems Research Group ,3)Mark Govett, NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Global Systems Division  4)Jeff S Smith, 1NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Global Systems Division          5)Stephen Weygandt, NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Global Systems Division........                                                                                                                The workflow document that scientists create describes a set of tasks and their runtime requirements and dependencies. It also specifies a set of “cycles” that usually correspond to simulation initialization times. The entire workflow is run for each cycle specified and, subject to the declared dependencies and real time constraints (if applicable), multiple cycles will be run concurrently. Scientists can compactly specify an arbitrarily large series of runs of a workflow that will automatically be executed as quickly as the underlying resources and specified dependencies
allow.

(Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu ,Maryam Purvis ,Martin Purvis ,Stephen Cranefield)Department of Information Science ,University of Otago......... Rapid changes in the business environment call for more flexible and adaptive workflow systems. Researchers have proposed that Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) comprising multiple agents can provide these capabilities. We have developed a multi-agent based workflow system, JBees, which supports distributed process models and the adaptability of executing processes. Modern workflow systems should also have the flexibility to integrate available web services as they are updated. In this paper we discuss how our agent-based architecture can be used to bind and access web services in the context of executing a workflow process model. We use an example from the diamond processing industry to show how our agent architecture can be used to integrate web services with WfMSs.