基于主动工作流视图的跨组织工作流管理和监控

跨组织工作流可以有效的利用不同企业的资源,提高企业的生产率,因而得到了越来越广泛的应用。如何使企业在增强对外交互能力的同时,保护企业内部的敏感信息,是跨组织工作流应用中的重要问题。工作流视图能有选择的隐藏企业私有工作流的细节,同时对外提供面向过程的接口,是一种有效的实现跨组织工作流的方法。在引入主动工作流视图概念的基础上,提出基于主动工作流视图的跨组织工作流管理和监控的体系结构,探讨了跨组织工作流的主动监控及其实现。     

Flexible Support and Management of Adaptive Workflow Processes

Workflow management and support has always been a constant challenge for workflow administrators in industry. This is characterized by the need to balance two conflicting goals—the need for control, and the need to provide sufficient flexibility for workflows to adapt to constantly changing business conditions. The traditional centralized and rigid model of workflow no longer suffices provide this balance. What is needed is an approach that provides sufficient flexibility while simultaneously providing an assurance of control for workflow administrators.In this paper, we present such an approach. Our approach is based on two bodies of research work. The first one is the OpenWater approach, wherein workflows meant to be discovered on the fly as workflow participants themselves define and execute the workflows. The second one is our earlier work on adaptive workflow, where we have developed a 3-tier architecture that supports adaptive workflow. In our paper, we enhance our 3-tier architecture with some of the OpenWater ideas, in order to develop what we have called a flexible workflow support and management architecture. We also demonstrate it on a real-life example in insurance claims processing.     

Optimizing Grid-Based Workflow Execution

Large-scale applications can be expressed as a set of tasks with data dependencies between them, also known as application workflows. Due to the scale and data processing requirements of these applications, they require Grid computing and storage resources. So far, the focus has been on developing easy to use interfaces for composing these workflows and finding an optimal mapping of tasks in the workflow to the Grid resources in order to minimize the completion time of the application. After this mapping is done, a workflow execution engine is required to run the workflow over the mapped resources. In this paper, we show that the performance of the workflow execution engine in executing the workflow can also be a critical factor in determining the workflow completion time. Using Condor as the workflow execution engine, we examine the various factors that affect the completion time of a fine granularity astronomy workflow. We show that changing the system parameters that influence these factors and restructuring the workflow can drastically reduce the completion time of this class of workflows. We also examine the effect on the optimizations developed for the astronomy application on a coarser granularity biology application. We were able to reduce the completion time of the Montage and the Tomography application workflows by 90% and 50%, respectively.     

A decentralized execution model for inter-organizational workflows

Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) are often used to support the automated execution of business processes. In today’s networked environment, it is not uncommon for organizations representing different business partners to collaborate for providing value-added services and products. As such, workflows representing the business processes in this loosely-coupled, dynamic and ad hoc coalition environment tend to span across the organizational boundaries. As a result, it is not viable to employ a single centralized WFMS to control the execution of the inter-organizational workflow due to limited scalability, availability and performance. To this end, in this paper, we present a decentralized workflow model, where inter-task dependencies are enforced without requiring to have a centralized WFMS. In our model, a workflow is divided into partitions called self-describing workflows, and handled by a light weight workflow management component, called the workflow stub, located at each organization. We present a performance study by considering different types of workflows with varying degrees of parallelism. Our performance results indicate that decentralized workflow management indeed enjoys significant gain in performance over its centralized counterpart in cases where there is less parallelism. The work of V. Atluri is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant IIS-0306838.     

基于构件的本体扩展工作流的构架研究与应用

几乎所有的行业都涉及工作流,用以协调任务之间的执行。由构件组成的工作流,可以提高系统的复用性,加快系统的开发和配置速度。但是构件之间句法语义的不同,决定了它们是不能直接组装的。论文提出基于本体扩展的工作流构件,使用本体来解决不同构件之间的元数据映射,并实现了基于构件的本体扩展工作流的框架,做出了具体实施。     

基于行为特征的语义工作流修正算法

工作流修正是工作流重用的重要任务.目前在基于工作流的可重用片段——stream的语义工作流修正中,当工作流stream库中不存在与检索语义工作流中的工作流stream结构相似的stream时,无法修正检索工作流.针对这种情况,提出了一种改进方案——基于stream行为特征修正语义工作流.使用任务紧邻关系集表达stream的行为特征.对于检索语义工作流中的每个与变更请求不一致的stream,使用锚集合数据索引和stream匹配规则对工作流stream库过滤得到候选匹配stream集;之后基于stream的行为相似性和变更请求对候选stream集进行验证,得到与变更请求一致程度最高和足够相似的匹配stream;然后更新变更请求,使用每个检索到的匹配stream替换原stream以逐步修正检索语义工作流中的缺陷;最后得到修正语义工作流.实验结果表明,与现有的基于工作流stream的修正算法相比,本文的算法得到了整体质量更好的修正语义工作流集,其适应性更好.该修正算法能为业务过程管理人员为适应新业务需求的工作流建模提供较好质量的修正语义工作流供参考,对提高工作流重用的效率和质量有较大帮助.     

Towards the construction of workflow-suitable conceptual modelling techniques

Despite their high-level and graphical nature, workflow specifications require a significant amount of implementation detail — for example application programming interface, database access and programming mechanisms for information flow — for a more comprehensive validation than is currently possible. This is currently recognized as a deficiency in workflow conceptualization. Although conceptual modelling techniques are available which are expressive, comprehensive and precise enough, we believe, their concepts and features are not specialized enough for workflow domains. In this paper, we offer a comparative insight into techniques which characterize different aspects and approaches of workflow specifications. These are: structured process modelling, object-oriented modelling, behavioural process modelling and business-oriented modelling. In particular, we determine gaps for workflows capturing operational business transaction processing, for example those of insurance claims, bank loans and government-related registration. For technique construction, we describe five workflow suitability principles.     

Optimizing virtual machine allocation for parallel scientific workflows in federated clouds

Cloud computing has established itself as an interesting computational model that provides a wide range of resources such as storage, databases and computing power for several types of users. Recently, the concept of cloud computing was extended with the concept of federated clouds where several resources from different cloud providers are inter-connected to perform a common action (e.g. execute a scientific workflow). Users can benefit from both single-provider and federated cloud environment to execute their scientific workflows since they can get the necessary amount of resources on demand. In several of these workflows, there is a demand for high performance and parallelism techniques since many activities are data and computing intensive and can execute for hours, days or even weeks. There are some Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWfMS) that already provide parallelism capabilities for scientific workflows in single-provider cloud. Most of them rely on creating a virtual cluster to execute the workflow in parallel. However, they also rely on the user to estimate the amount of virtual machines to be allocated to create this virtual cluster. Most SWfMS use this initial virtual cluster configuration made by the user for the entire workflow execution. Dimensioning the virtual cluster to execute the workflow in parallel is then a top priority task since if the virtual cluster is under or over dimensioned it can impact on the workflow performance or increase (unnecessarily) financial costs. This dimensioning is far from trivial in a single-provider cloud and specially in federated clouds due to the huge number of virtual machine types to choose in each location and provider. In this article, we propose an approach named GraspCC-fed to produce the optimal (or near-optimal) estimation of the amount of virtual machines to allocate for each workflow. GraspCC-fed extends a previously proposed heuristic based on GRASP for executing standalone applications to consider scientific workflows executed in both single-provider and federated clouds. For the experiments, GraspCC-fed was coupled to an adapted version of SciCumulus workflow engine for federated clouds. This way, we believe that GraspCC-fed can be an important decision support tool for users and it can help determining an optimal configuration for the virtual cluster for parallel cloud-based scientific workflows.     

Contract-collaboration network method for modeling manufacturing resource control workflows

This paper presents contract-collaboration network (CC-Net) method that is developed to model manufacturing resource control workflows. The CC-Net is an object-oriented class diagram. It depicts the contract-collaboration relationships among the classes in a manufacturing system, with constraints. The CC-Net method uses a primitive modeling block called collaboration module by which the CC-Net is established systematically. This idea is very similar to that of the Lego® block toy. Unlike most workflow modeling methods, the CC-Net method views workflow modeling as a constraint satisfaction process. That is, describing the set of constraint recovery rules corresponding to the constraint violations is regarded as workflow modeling. The obtained set of workflow rules is free from process deadlock and considers all the events of triggering the workflow. We explore the use of the CC-Net method for the workflow modeling of a flexible manufacturing system.     

Workflow View Driven Cross-Organizational Interoperability in a Web Service Environment

Workflow technology has recently been employed not only within businesses but also as a framework for implementing e-services over the Internet. Such e-services typically require collaborative enactment of workflows across multiple organizations. In this paper, we propose the use of workflow views as a fundamental support mechanism for the interoperability of multiple workflows across business organizations. We present a meta-model of workflow views and their semantics using a cross-organization workflow example based on a supply-chain e-service. We also formulate an interoperation model of workflow views and its consistency criteria. Finally, this paper presents an implementation of the model based on XML and contemporary Web services technologies, with adaptation to our E-ADOME workflow engine.     

跨组织工作流的动态协同技术研究

跨组织的工作流致力于跨越组织边界进行业务重组。针对多个组织间动态协同的复杂性,在组织间协作过程中必须考虑对组织的隐私信息、已建立的工作流和已建立的工作流管理系统的保护,解决成员间进行信息共享时出现的问题,从而真正实现协同商务。为满足这些需求,提出了基于视图的方法,这个方法考虑了工作流和资源的部分可见性,不同程度的可见性可以使企业保持其内部工作流隐私和安全性所需的水平,从而把工作流的可见性降低到合作所需的最低水平。研究的目的是使得组织在增强对外交互能力的同时,保护组织内部的敏感信息。     

基于对象代理模型的工作流视图实现

工作流视图源自数据库的视图概念,主要为了支持Web服务环境中工作流的互操作性和对外界面的柔软性,以适应各种不同应用的需要．然而．目前还没有一种很好的工作流视图的实现机制．该文提出用对象代理模型来实现工作流视图,主要包括工作流相关类的代理类以及代数操作的定义．根据XML过程定义语言(XPDL)的过程元模型,可以用这些代数操作为工作流的每一个类导出各种所需的代理类,实现柔软的工作流视图．     

Trigger在工作流设计中的应用

在动态环境中设计工作流，需要一个具有高灵活性和易于使用的工作流模型。在工作流设计中建立独立于主工作流之外的异常情况模型，可以扩展工作流设计所应用的范围。本文以河南省电力公司管理系统中的具体实践为例，说明了trigger设计在实际问题中的应用。     

基于Web服务的异构工作流互联接口设计

为了实现企业间异构工作流系统的优势互补和信息共享,针对工作流呈现出的异构、分布等特点,提出了一种基于Web服务的异构工作流流程互联接口设计,以解决异构流程互联问题。从调用接口、调用方式、调用返回等三个方面描述了基于Web服务的流程互联解决方案;并以XPDL描述的SynchroFlow工作流流程与BPEL描述的ODE工作流流程为例,实现了这两种异构工作流的流程相互调用。     

Inheritance of Interorganizational Workflows to Enable Business-to-Business E-Commerce

The World-Wide-Web is fast becoming a crucial medium for electronic commerce. Many companies are now involved in on-line retailing of goods and services to consumers through the Web. In some industries, business partnerships are being fostered in order to broaden the scope of their markets. One example is the telecommunications industry, where changes in business structure, spirited by deregulation, have resulted in alliances amongst different communications providers, including new players like the utilities and entertainment providers. In this environment, business processes may involve multiple co-operating entities and, supporting such interorganizational business processes can be achieved through the use of workflow management systems. In this paper, we present an approach for designing interorganizational workflows that supports co-operation of business partners, while preserving the autonomy of the partner organizations.     

Mapping Abstract Complex Workflows onto Grid Environments

In this paper we address the problem of automatically generating job workflows for the Grid. These workflows describe the execution of a complex application built from individual application components. In our work we have developed two workflow generators: the first (the Concrete Workflow Generator CWG) maps an abstract workflow defined in terms of application-level components to the set of available Grid resources. The second generator (Abstract and Concrete Workflow Generator, ACWG) takes a wider perspective and not only performs the abstract to concrete mapping but also enables the construction of the abstract workflow based on the available components. This system operates in the application domain and chooses application components based on the application metadata attributes. We describe our current ACWG based on AI planning technologies and outline how these technologies can play a crucial role in developing complex application workflows in Grid environments. Although our work is preliminary, CWG has already been used to map high energy physics applications onto the Grid. In one particular experiment, a set of production runs lasted 7 days and resulted in the generation of 167,500 events by 678 jobs. Additionally, ACWG was used to map gravitational physics workflows, with hundreds of nodes onto the available resources, resulting in 975 tasks, 1365 data transfers and 975 output files produced.     

着色时间工作流网任务调度的时间约束分析

为实现工作流管理系统中的任务调度和时间管理,避免流程在多任务运转时产生溢出,提高流程的工作效率。采用不固定时延定义了着色时间Petri网,通过控制任务间的最小时距避免了溢出,并用任务监测器实现了相应的控制策略。以各任务间的时间间隔最小为优化目标,对串行、并行、条件选择和循环四种基本着色时间工作流网进行了时序分析和任务调度,推导出多任务在基本着色时间工作流网调度的数学模型和着色时间工作流网整体运行时间函数的计算公式。最后通过一个审批流程对论述的任务调度方法进行了验证。     

工作流模型挖掘算法及其应用研究

工作流管理系统由工作流模型所驱动,但产业界的实践表明定义工作流模型的工作不仅费时而且易错。工作流挖掘技术能够帮助解决这一问题,并能为现有工作流的分析与优化提供参考。简要介绍三种典型且具有应用价值的工作流模型挖掘算法,并应用其中一种挖掘算法,详细讨论了一个实际的工作流模型挖掘过程。挖掘过程以某Staffware系统的工作流日志文件为起点,包括数据预处理、初始工作流模型挖掘、初始工作流模型化简三个主要步骤,具体实现可通过一个工作流模型挖掘子系统参与完成。     

Using a suite of ontologies for preserving workflow-centric research objects

Scientific workflows are a popular mechanism for specifying and automating data-driven in silico experiments. A significant aspect of their value lies in their potential to be reused. Once shared, workflows become useful building blocks that can be combined or modified for developing new experiments. However, previous studies have shown that storing workflow specifications alone is not sufficient to ensure that they can be successfully reused, without being able to understand what the workflows aim to achieve or to re-enact them. To gain an understanding of the workflow, and how it may be used and repurposed for their needs, scientists require access to additional resources such as annotations describing the workflow, datasets used and produced by the workflow, and provenance traces recording workflow executions.In this article, we present a novel approach to the preservation of scientific workflows through the application of research objects—aggregations of data and metadata that enrich the workflow specifications. Our approach is realised as a suite of ontologies that support the creation of workflow-centric research objects. Their design was guided by requirements elicited from previous empirical analyses of workflow decay and repair. The ontologies developed make use of and extend existing well known ontologies, namely the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) vocabulary, the Annotation Ontology (AO) and the W3C PROV ontology (PROVO). We illustrate the application of the ontologies for building Workflow Research Objects with a case-study that investigates Huntington’s disease, performed in collaboration with a team from the Leiden University Medial Centre (HG-LUMC). Finally we present a number of tools developed for creating and managing workflow-centric research objects.