基于Petri网的工作流时间动态预测及验证

目前,工作流管理系统不能有效的处理时间管理问题,为了动态预测活动发生的时间间隔,验证时间的一致性,预知潜在的时间冲突,首先建立基于时间Petri网的扩展工作流网(XTWF-net),然后根据工作流管理联盟规定的几种基本结构推导出时间预测规则,并采用面向对象技术实现了预测算法,最后给出了动态验证的方法和决策策略.     

基于资源和时间限制的多工作流网及可调度性验证

工作流建模阶段的验证工作对工作流的成功执行具有重要意义.首先分析了与工作流执行密切相关的资源和时间特性,考虑到工作流应用系统中总是有若干工作流并发执行,于是综合考虑结构、时间、资源限制三个层面,提出一个工作流应用系统一般性限制框架.基于该框架提出了多工作流网原型,并进一步给出了多工作流网下资源冲突和可调度性的概念,最后给出了多工作流网可调度性验证算法及其冲突解决方案.     

On verification of nested workflows with extra constraints: From theory to practice

Workflows are used to formally describe processes of various types such as business and manufacturing processes. One of the critical tasks of workflow management is automated discovery of possible flaws in the workflow – workflow verification. In this paper, we formalize the problem of workflow verification as the problem of verifying that there exists a feasible process for each task in the workflow. This problem is tractable for nested workflows that are the workflows with a hierarchical structure similar to hierarchical task networks in planning. However, we show that if extra synchronization, precedence, or causal constraints are added to the nested structure, the workflow verification problem becomes NP-complete. We present a workflow verification algorithm for nested workflows with extra constraints that is based on constraint satisfaction techniques and exploits an incremental temporal reasoning algorithm. We then experimentally demonstrate efficiency of the proposed techniques on randomly generated workflows with various structures and sizes. The paper is concluded by notes on exploiting the presented techniques in the application FlowOpt for modeling, optimizing, visualizing, and analyzing production workflows.     

On Modeling and Verification of Temporal Constraints in Production Workflows

The dynamic nature of events, in particular business processes, is a natural and accepted feature of today’s business environment. Therefore, workflow systems, if they are to successfully model portions of the real world, need to acknowledge the temporal aspect of business processes. This is particularly true for processes where any deviation from the prescribed model is either very expensive, dangerous or even illegal. Such processes include legal processes, airline maintenance or hazardous material handling. However, time modeling in workflows is still an open research problem. This paper proposes a framework for time modeling in production workflows. Relevant temporal constraints are presented, and rules for their verification are defined. Furthermore, to enable visualization of some temporal constraints, a concept of “duration space” is introduced. The duration algorithm which calculates the shortest/longest workflow instance is presented. It is a generalization of two categories of algorithms: the shortest-path partitioning algorithm and the Critical Path Method (CPM). Based on the duration algorithm, the verification algorithm is designed to check the consistency of introduced temporal constraints.     

基于时间约束Petri网的工作流动态一致性检验

工作流系统中的时间管理是工作流建模和分析的重要组成部分。支持动态修改是人们在实际应用中对工作流系统提出的新要求。文中在基于时间约束的Petri网模型基础上,根据时间约束推理规则,提出一种动态修改时间约束时检验工作流一致性的方法,从而丰富了工作流的时间管理功能。     

An incremental analysis for resource conflicts to workflow specifications

Workflow management technology helps modulizing and controlling complex business processes within an enterprise. Generally speaking, a workflow management system (WfMS) is composed of two primary components, a design environment and a run-time system. Structural, timing and resource verifications of a workflow specification are required to assure the correctness of the specified system. In this paper, an incremental methodology is constructed to analyze resource consistency and temporal constraints after each edit unit defined on a workflow specification. The methodology introduces several algorithms for general and temporal analyses. The output returned right away can improve the judgment and thus the speed and quality on designing.     

工作流时序约束模型分析与验证方法

为了解决工作流时间建模与时序一致性验证问题,以时序逻辑和模型检查为基础,提出了一种工作流时间建模与时序一致性验证方法.该方法用一阶逻辑描述工作流模型及其时间信息,用时序逻辑描述工作流的时序约束,用模型检查算法对时序约束进行验证与分析.该方法不是针对某一种时序约束提出来的,而是能够验证任何用时序逻辑描述的工作流时序约束.该方法还能够对未通过验证的时序约束提供工作流运行实例作为反例,帮助用户定位模型的问题.以一个工作流时间建模和时序一致性验证的实例证实了所提出方法的有效性.     

Formal Verification of Temporal Properties for Reduced Overhead in Grid Scientific Workflows

With quick development of grid techniques and growing complexity of grid applications, it is becoming critical for reasoning temporal properties of grid workflows to probe potential pitfalls and errors, in order to ensure reliability and trustworthiness at the initial design phase. A state Pi calculus is proposed and implemented in this work, which not only enables flexible abstraction and management of historical grid system events, but also facilitates modeling and temporal verification of grid workflows. Furthermore, a relaxed region analysis (RRA) approach is proposed to decompose large scale grid workflows into sequentially composed regions with relaxation of parallel workflow branches, and corresponding verification strategies are also decomposed following modular verification principles. Performance evaluation results show that the RRA approach can dramatically reduce CPU time and memory usage of formal verification     

Role-based authorizations for workflow systems in support of task-based separation of duty

Role-based authorizations for assigning tasks of workflows to roles/users are crucial to security management in workflow management systems. The authorizations must enforce separation of duty (SoD) constraints to prevent fraud and errors. This work analyzes and defines several duty-conflict relationships among tasks, and designs authorization rules to enforce SoD constraints based on the analysis. A novel authorization model that incorporates authorization rules is then proposed to support the planning of assigning tasks to roles/users, and the run-time activation of tasks. Different from existing work, the proposed authorization model considers the AND/XOR split structures of workflows and execution dependency among tasks to enforce separation of duties in assigning tasks to roles/users. A prototype system is developed to realize the effectiveness of the proposed authorization model.     

Predicting temporal violations for parallel business cloud workflows

Workflow temporal violations, namely, intermediate workflow runtime delays, often occur and have a serious impact on the on‐time completion of massive concurrent requests. Therefore, accurate prediction of cloud workflow temporal violations is critical as its result can serve as an essential reference for temporal violation prevention and handling strategies. Conventional studies mainly focus on the time delays of a single workflow activity or a single workflow instance but overlook the propagation of time delays among them. This is a serious problem as time delays can propagate in cloud workflow system due to resource sharing and the dependencies among workflow activities. This paper first proposes a novel temporal violation transmission model inspired by an epidemic model to model the dynamics of time delay propagation. Afterward, a novel temporal violation prediction strategy is presented to estimate the number of temporal violations that may occur and determine the number of violations that must be handled to achieve the target service‐level agreement, namely, the on‐time completion rate. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to predict cloud workflow temporal violations at the workflow build‐time stage by analyzing the propagation of temporal violations. Experimental results demonstrate that our strategy can make highly accurate predictions and is scalable for a large batch of parallel workflows running in the cloud.     

Specification and validation of process constraints for flexible workflows

Workflow systems have traditionally focused on the so-called production processes which are characterized by pre-definition, high volume, and repetitiveness. Recently, the deployment of workflow systems in non-traditional domains such as collaborative applications, e-learning and cross-organizational process integration, have put forth new requirements for flexible and dynamic specification. However, this flexibility cannot be offered at the expense of control, a critical requirement of business processes.In this paper, we will present a foundation set of constraints for flexible workflow specification. These constraints are intended to provide an appropriate balance between flexibility and control. The constraint specification framework is based on the concept of “pockets of flexibility” which allows ad hoc changes and/or building of workflows for highly flexible processes. Basically, our approach is to provide the ability to execute on the basis of a partially specified model, where the full specification of the model is made at runtime, and may be unique to each instance.The verification of dynamically built models is essential. Where as ensuring that the model conforms to specified constraints does not pose great difficulty, ensuring that the constraint set itself does not carry conflicts and redundancy is an interesting and challenging problem. In this paper, we will provide a discussion on both the static and dynamic verification aspects. We will also briefly present Chameleon, a prototype workflow engine that implements these concepts.     

An architecture for workflow scheduling under resource allocation constraints

Research on specification and scheduling of workflows has concentrated on temporal and causality constraints, which specify existence and order dependencies among tasks. However, another set of constraints that specify resource allocation is also equally important. The resources in a workflow environment are agents such as person, machine, software, etc. that execute the task. Execution of a task has a cost and this may vary depending on the resources allocated in order to execute that task. Resource allocation constraints define restrictions on how to allocate resources, and scheduling under resource allocation constraints provide proper resource allocation to tasks. In this work, we provide an architecture to specify and to schedule workflows under resource allocation constraints as well as under the temporal and causality constraints. A specification language with the ability to express resources and resource allocation constraints and a scheduler module that contains a constraint solver in order to find correct resource assignments are core and novel parts of this architecture.     

Self-adapting workflow reconfiguration

Because web services are highly interoperable, they are capable of providing uniform access to underlying technologies, allowing developers to choose between competing services. Workflow languages, such as BPEL, compose and sequence Web service invocations resulting in meaningful, and sometimes, repeated tasks. Their prevalence means there may be multiple Web services that perform the same operation with some better than others depending on the situation. Their potential for being unavailable at critical workflow execution times forces a reliance on such redundant services. One remedy for unavailability and situational awareness constraints is using quality of service factors and user-directed preferences to assign priorities to workflows and services to perform run-time replacement. In this paper we describe a novel approach to self-adapting workflow reconfiguration. We discuss the implementation of our approach embodied by the Next-generation Workflow Toolkit that supports runtime workflow reconfiguration using BPEL with a commercial workflow engine. A key design feature is the decoupling of user-directed changes regarding service priority from the actual workflow execution, allowing NeWT to effectively manage and recover from workflow changes at any time. We evaluate NeWT by comparing the same example across multiple commercial systems that claim reconfiguration capabilities.     

Multi-QoS constrained and Profit-aware scheduling approach for concurrent workflows on heterogeneous systems

The execution of a workflow application can result in an imbalanced workload among allocated processors, ultimately resulting in a waste of resources and a higher cost to the user. Here, we consider a dynamic resource management system in which processors are reserved not for a job but only to run a task, thus allowing a higher resource usage rate. This paper presents a scheduling algorithm that manages concurrent workflows in a dynamic environment in which jobs are submitted by users at any moment in time, on shared heterogeneous resources, and constrained to a specified budget and deadline for each job. Recent research attempted to propose dynamic strategies for concurrent workflows but only addressed fairness in resource sharing among applications while minimizing the execution time. The Multi-QoS Profit-Aware scheduling algorithm (MQ-PAS) proposed here is able to increase the profit achieved by the provider by considering the budget available for each job to define tasks priorities. We study the scalability of the algorithm with different types of workflows and infrastructures. The experimental results show that our strategy improves provider revenue significantly and obtains comparable successful rates of completed jobs.     

A characterization of workflow management systems for extreme-scale applications

Automation of the execution of computational tasks is at the heart of improving scientific productivity. Over the last years, scientific workflows have been established as an important abstraction that captures data processing and computation of large and complex scientific applications. By allowing scientists to model and express entire data processing steps and their dependencies, workflow management systems relieve scientists from the details of an application and manage its execution on a computational infrastructure. As the resource requirements of today’s computational and data science applications that process vast amounts of data keep increasing, there is a compelling case for a new generation of advances in high-performance computing, commonly termed as extreme-scale computing, which will bring forth multiple challenges for the design of workflow applications and management systems. This paper presents a novel characterization of workflow management systems using features commonly associated with extreme-scale computing applications. We classify 15 popular workflow management systems in terms of workflow execution models, heterogeneous computing environments, and data access methods. The paper also surveys workflow applications and identifies gaps for future research on the road to extreme-scale workflows and management systems.     

A collaborative scheduling approach for service-driven scientific workflow execution

Scientific workflow execution often spans multiple self-managing administrative domains to obtain specific processing capabilities. Existing (global) analysis techniques tend to mandate every domain-specific application to unveil all private behaviors for scientific collaboration. In practice, it is infeasible for a domain-specific application to disclose its process details (as a private workflow fragment) for privacy or security reasons. Consequently, it is a challenging endeavor to coordinate scientific workflows and its distributed domain-specific applications. To address this problem, we propose a collaborative scheduling approach that can deal with temporal dependencies between a scientific workflow and a private workflow fragment. Under this collaborative scheduling approach, a private workflow fragment could maintain the temporal consistency with a scientific workflow in resource sharing and task enactments. Further, an evaluation is also presented to demonstrate the proposed approach for coordinating multiple scientific workflow executions in a concurrent environment.     

Dynamic Workflow Modeling and Analysis in Incident Command Systems

The workflow management of incident command systems (ICSs) has been challenged by the systems' special requirements on flexibility, intuitiveness, and capacity of correctness verification. The significance of applying formal approaches to the modeling and analysis of workflows has been well recognized, and many such approaches have been proposed. However, these approaches require users to master considerable knowledge of the particular formalisms, which impacts the application of these approaches on a larger scale. This paper presents a new formal, yet intuitive, approach for the modeling and analysis of workflows, which attempts to overcome the aforementioned problem. In addition to the abilities of supporting workflow validation and enactment, this new approach possesses the distinguishing feature of allowing users who are not proficient in formal methods to build up and dynamically modify the workflow models that address the flexibility needs of ICSs.      

SEAM: A state-entity-activity-model for a well-defined workflowdevelopment methodology

Current conceptual workflow models use either informally defined conceptual models or several formally defined conceptual models that capture different aspects of the workflow, e.g., the data, process, and organizational aspects of the workflow. To the best of our knowledge, there are no algorithms that can amalgamate these models to yield a single view of reality. A fragmented conceptual view is useful for systems analysis and documentation. However, it fails to realize the potential of conceptual models to provide a convenient interface to automate the design and management of workflows. First, as a step toward accomplishing this objective, we propose SEAM (State-Entity-Activity-Model), a conceptual workflow model defined in terms of set theory. Second, no attempt has been made, to the best of our knowledge, to incorporate time into a conceptual workflow model. SEAM incorporates the temporal aspect of workflows. Third, we apply SEAM to a real-life organizational unit's workflows. In this work, we show a subset of the workflows modeled for this organization using SEAM. We also demonstrate, via a prototype application, how the SEAM schema can be implemented on a relational database management system. We present the lessons we learned about the advantages obtained for the organization and, for developers who choose to use SEAM, we also present potential pitfalls in using the SEAM methodology to build workflow systems on relational platforms. The information contained in this work is sufficient enough to allow application developers to utilize SEAM as a methodology to analyze, design, and construct workflow applications on current relational database management systems. The definition of SEAM as a context-free grammar, definition of its semantics, and its mapping to relational platforms should be sufficient also, to allow the construction of an automated workflow design and construction tool with SEAM as the user interface