基于Web的工作流管理系统:co-Flow

讨论Internet环境下协同产品开发的特征，研究它对工作流管理系统的要求，为适应这些要求，提出一些基于Web的工作流管理系统软件体系结构，并详细介绍了该系统中的基于XML的工作流过程定义和分布式流引擎间的互操作机制。该系统的软件原型“co-Flow”能够适应Internt环境下协同产品开发的需求。     

A new optimization phase for scientific workflow management systems

Scientific workflows have emerged as an important tool for combining the computational power with data analysis for all scientific domains in e-science, especially in the life sciences. They help scientists to design and execute complex in silico experiments. However, with rising complexity it becomes increasingly impractical to optimize scientific workflows by trial and error. To address this issue, we propose to insert a new optimization phase into the common scientific workflow life cycle. This paper describes the design and implementation of an automated optimization framework for scientific workflows to implement this phase. Our framework was integrated into Taverna, a life-science oriented workflow management system and offers a versatile programming interface (API), which enables easy integration of arbitrary optimization methods. We have used this API to develop an example plugin for parameter optimization that is based on a Genetic Algorithm. Two use cases taken from the areas of structural bioinformatics and proteomics demonstrate how our framework facilitates setup, execution, and monitoring of workflow parameter optimization in high performance computing e-science environments.     

Metaparadigm's adventures: Incorporating design situations in software process design

Our practical experiences and theoretical research in the field of software design and its management have resulted in the conclusion that to enable successful software system design in any design situation we must first design an appropriate design paradigm. This activity was called the metadesign and a metadesign paradigm a metaparadigm. Following recent scientific findings we decided that a metaparadigm should be pluralistic, useful, systemic, easy to use and recursivelly adaptable (recursive adaptability states that a metaparadigm must be an iterative learning system accumulating new knowledge about metadesign, software system design and related). It should be composed out of a suitable framework, theory and a metadesign methodology and philosophy. Currently we have designated the idea of a process as the framework, the Checklands Soft System Methodology as the methodology and philosophy, and the process formalization (metamodeling) as the theory.     

S3Mining: A model-driven engineering approach for supporting novice data miners in selecting suitable classifiers

Data mining has proven to be very useful in order to extract information from data in many different contexts. However, due to the complexity of data mining techniques, it is required the know-how of an expert in this field to select and use them. Actually, adequately applying data mining is out of the reach of novice users which have expertise in their area of work, but lack skills to employ these techniques. In this paper, we use both model-driven engineering and scientific workflow standards and tools in order to develop named S3Mining framework, which supports novice users in the process of selecting the data mining classification algorithm that better fits with their data and goal. To this aim, this selection process uses the past experiences of expert data miners with the application of classification techniques over their own datasets. The contributions of our S3Mining framework are as follows: (i) an approach to create a knowledge base which stores the past experiences of experts users, (ii) a process that provides the expert users with utilities for the construction of classifiers’ recommenders based on the existing knowledge base, (iii) a system that allows novice data miners to use these recommenders for discovering the classifiers that better fit for solving their problem at hand, and (iv) a public implementation of the framework’s workflows. Finally, an experimental evaluation has been conducted to shown the feasibility of our framework.     

What agents can do in workflow management systems

Workflow management systems are an emerging category of information systems, currently under dynamic evolution. On the other hand software agents are a distinct research area as well as an emerging paradigm for information systems design and development. This paper tries to examine the integration of these two fields; reveal the stimulation and the advantages of such a mixing. Popular standards of the workflow management field are used to derive a classification scheme, which is exploited to map existing approaches. As a significant number of existing approaches is reviewed, a plethora of integration patterns are identified and grouped according to the proposed classification scheme. The overall goal of the paper is to clear the vague picture of the consolidation of workflow management systems and software agents and to provide an unifying framework for this intersected area.     

Using VisTrails and Provenance for Teaching Scientific Visualization

Over the last 20 years, visualization courses have been developed and offered at universities around the world. Many of these courses use established visualization libraries and tools (e.g. VTK, ParaView, AVS, VisIt) as a way to provide students a hands‐on experience, allowing them to prototype and explore different visualization techniques. In this paper, we describe our experiences using VisTrails as a platform to teach scientific visualization. VisTrails is an open‐source system that was designed to support exploratory computational tasks such as visualization and data analysis. Unlike previous scientific workflow and visualization systems, VisTrails provides a comprehensive provenance management infrastructure. We discuss how different features of the system, and in particular, the provenance information have changed the dynamics of the Scientific Visualization course we offer at the University of Utah. We also describe our initial attempts at using the provenance information to better assess our teaching techniques and student performance.     

基于.NET和数据库的轻量级工作流引擎的研究

工作流技术是目前发展较为快速的业务过程自动化技术。文章通过对在软件开发和实施过程中所发现问题的分析,从提高开发效率及软件的灵活性、健壮性出发,提出了基于.NET和数据库的轻量级工作流引擎的框架结构,详细讨论了如何利用.NET平台与数据库技术协同进行工作流引擎开发的问题,给出了工作流引擎的设计原理以及具体的表示和实现方法。该工作流引擎已应用到实际的应用系统中。实践表明,利用该工作流引擎可以显著地缩短关键业务的开发周期,结构化满足了用户的工作流使用需求。     

A scientific data processing framework for time series NetCDF data

The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Data Integrator (ADI) is a framework designed to streamline the development of scientific algorithms that analyze, and models that use time-series NetCDF data. ADI automates the process of retrieving and preparing data for analysis, provides a modular, flexible framework that simplifies software development, and supports a data integration workflow. Algorithm and model input data, preprocessing, and output data specifications are defined through a graphical interface. ADI includes a library of software modules to support the workflow, and a source code generator that produces C, IDL^®, and Python™ templates to jump start development. While developed for processing climate data, ADI can be applied to any time-series data. This paper discusses the ADI framework, and how ADI's capabilities can decrease the time and cost of implementing scientific algorithms allowing modelers and scientists to focus their efforts on their research rather than preparing and packaging data.     

An overview of workflow management: From process modeling to workflow automation infrastructure

Today's business enterprises must deal with global competition, reduce the cost of doing business, and rapidly develop new services and products. To address these requirements enterprises must constantly reconsider and optimize the way they do business and change their information systems and applications to support evolving business processes. Workflow technology facilitates these by providing methodologies and software to support (i) business process modeling to capture business processes as workflow specifications, (ii) business process reengineering to optimize specified processes, and (iii) workflow automation to generate workflow implementations from workflow specifications. This paper provides a high-level overview of the current workflow management methodologies and software products. In addition, we discuss the infrastructure technologies that can address the limitations of current commercial workflow technology and extend the scope and mission of workflow management systems to support increased workflow automation in complex real-world environments involving heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed information systems. In particular, we discuss how distributed object management and customized transaction management can support further advances in the commercial state of the art in this area. Recomended by: Omran Bukhres and e. Kühn     

基于构件的地理工作流框架:一个方法学的探讨

软件框架为特定领域的软件复用带来了便利.众所周知,软件框架开发的难度要大于开发一个普通可复用构件.采用支持黑盒复用的基于构件的软件框架概念,探讨了地理工作流框架的开发过程.一个地理工作流应用是地理信息领域的工作流管理系统,它可以通过复用地理工作流框架实现.从方法学的角度看,为了开发地理工作流框架,需要进行以下活动:领域分析、领域设计、框架设计和实现.其输出分别是识别了领域变化性的领域模型、领域特定的软件体系结构(DSSA)、软件框架产品.在地理工作流的上下文中,首先对领域变化性进行了识别和分类,包括空间数据类型、空间数据管理、空间操作、过程和空间数据表现5个方面的变化性,它们可以组织成树状视图.然后,为了处理上述变化性,设计了DSSA和框架的软件体系结构,其中前者是后者的模板,而框架体系结构采用HMB风格.最后,对地理工作流框架构件的开发以及框架复用进行了简单描述.与其他地理工作流系统相比,其优势在于由于框架扩展能力带来的灵活性.     

Utilizing Event-B for domain engineering: a critical analysis

This paper presents our experience of modeling land transportation domain in the formal framework of Event-B. Well-specified requirements are crucial for good software design; they depend on the understanding of the domain. Thus, domain engineering becomes an essential activity. The possibility to have a formal model of a domain, consistent with the use of formal methods for developing critical software working within it, is an important issue. Safety-critical domains, like transportation, exhibit interesting features, such as high levels of nondeterminism, complex interactions, stringent safety properties, and multifaceted timing attributes. The formal representation of these features is a challenging task. We explore the possibility of utilizing Event-B as a domain engineering tool. We discuss the problems we faced during this exercise and how we tackled them. Special attention is devoted to the issue of the validation of the model, in particular with a technique based on the animation of specifications. Event-B is mature enough to be an effective tool to model domains except in some areas, temporal properties mainly, where more work is still needed.     

Dealing with forward and backward jumps in workflow management systems

Workflow management systems (WfMS) offer a promising technology for the realization of process-centered application systems. A deficiency of existing WfMS is their inadequate support for dealing with exceptional deviations from the standard procedure. In the ADEPT project, therefore, we have developed advanced concepts for workflow modeling and execution, which aim at the increase of flexibility in WfMS. On the one hand we allow workflow designers to model exceptional execution paths already at buildtime provided that these deviations are known in advance. On the other hand authorized users may dynamically deviate from the pre-modeled workflow at runtime as well in order to deal with unforeseen events. In this paper, we focus on forward and backward jumps needed in this context. We describe sophisticated modeling concepts for capturing deviations in workflow models already at buildtime, and we show how forward and backward jumps (of different semantics) can be correctly applied in an ad-hoc manner during runtime as well. We work out basic requirements, facilities, and limitations arising in this context. Our experiences with applications from different domains have shown that the developed concepts will form a key part of process flexibility in process-centered information systems. Received: 6 October 2002 / Accepted: 8 January 2003 Published online: 27 February 2003 This paper is a revised and extended version of [40]. The described work was partially performed in the research project “Scalability in Adaptive Workflow Management Systems” funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).     

基于ISO9000和CMM的软件质量管理系统的研究

本文在研究ISO9000和CMM质量管理的基础上，分析了Browser/Server结构下软件质量管理平台的主要组成框架和技术，其中主要包括工作流和文档流的管理以及软件过程管理和改进的框架。通过研究在开发过程中工作流和文档流的管理，以及各个工作单元之间的有机协调和控制，并结合中间过程的数据记录、统计、分析和决策，实现了项目跟踪和监控，从而保证了软件开发过程的质量和企业生产成熟度能力的提高，并实现持续地软件过程改进。     

Framework for automated partitioning and execution of scientific workflows in the cloud

Scientific workflows have become a standardized way for scientists to represent a set of tasks to overcome/solve a certain scientific problem. Usually these workflows consist of numerous CPU and I/O-intensive jobs that are executed using workflow management systems (WfMS), on clouds, grids, supercomputers, etc. Previously, it was shown that using k-way partitioning to distribute a workflow’s tasks between multiple machines in the cloud reduces the overall data communication and therefore lowers the cost of the bandwidth usage. A framework was built to automate this process of partitioning and execution of any workflow submitted by a scientist that is meant to be run on Pegasus WfMS, in the cloud, with ease. The framework provisions the instances in the cloud using CloudML, configures and installs all the software needed for the execution, partitions and runs the provided scientific workflow, also showing the estimated makespan and cost.     

A role-oriented service system architecture for enterprise process collaboration

Workflow management is a key technique for coordinating various business processes. Traditional workflow systems are often built with the client/server architecture, in which, a single workflow server takes the responsibility of the entire operation. This paper discusses a model-driven process enactment environment, which can support an enterprise businesses collaboration. Some key technologies regarding models and the system are discussed in the paper, including the mappings between activities in process models and the service function of applications, how to use XML in the process model, and other workflow engine techniques. A software architecture supporting role-oriented services within the process-driven enterprise enactment environment has been proposed and implemented. The proposed framework has been validated with a case study in the 4PL business system.     

BPS工作流平台在协同办公系统中的应用

针对企业内部管理协作高效需求的日益凸显,介绍了普元工作流平台的参考模型。基于普元BPS工作流平台,构建了企业协同办公系统功能框架,并以企业核心业务发文处理流程为例,探讨了基于BPS工作流系统的流程设计过程,对构建信息共享和业务协同的高效企业具有重要意义。     

Agentsheets: a medium for creating domain-oriented visual languages

Customized visual representations enable end users to achieve their programming goals. Here, designers work with users to tailor visual programming languages to specific problem domains. We describe a design methodology and a tool for creating domain oriented, end user programming languages that effectively use visualization. We first describe a collaborative design methodology involving end users and designers. We then present Agentsheets, a tool for creating domain oriented visual programming languages, and illustrate how it supports collaborative design by examining experiences from a real language design project. Finally, we summarize the contributions of our approach and discuss its viability in industrial design projects