Some fundamental requirements of workflow enactment are autonomous,
distributed, decentralized control that can cope with partial lack of
information and can adapt to a dynamically changing environment. A highly abstract coordination model that conforms these requirements is
envisioned as a chemical reaction where molecules can react autonomously
according to actual and local conditions. The goal is to provide a framework
where activities and resources - similarly to chemical molecules - can manage
themselves without any predefined pattern, global or stored information or
centralized control.
- It was investigated how workflow enactment can be modeled and formalized using gamma-calculus . The chemical metaphor is realized by introducing the concept of active resource quantums and putting all entities of the system into gamma-context. Workflow control, resource scheduling, handling dependencies and errors, the state of computation and computed results are all represented in a single declarative formalism that has a mathematically well founded semantics.
- It was investigated what requirements dynamic scientific workflows represent and how they can be fulfilled by a chemical model that is able to grasp the semantics of an autonomic evolving system. A more elaborated model has been designed supporting virtually all possible workflow types including multiple instances and multiple versions simultaneously, dynamic changes and interactivity.
References
- Zs. Németh, C. Pérez, T. Priol: Workflow Enactment Based on a Chemical Metaphor. 3rd IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods, SEFM 2005, Koblenz, Germany, IEEE Computer Society Press.
http://www.lpds.sztaki.hu/~zsnemeth/pub/sefm05.pdf
- Zs. Németh, C. Pérez, T. Priol: Distributed Workflow Coordination: Molecules and Reactions. Workshop on Nature Inspired Distributed Computing, in Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS 2006, Rhodes, Greece, IEEE Society Press. http://www.lpds.sztaki.hu/~zsnemeth/pub/ipdps_nidisc06.pdf
- M. Caeiro, Zs. Németh, T. Priol: A Chemical Workflow Engine to Support Scientific Workflows with Dynamicity Support. 3rd Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science, in conjunction with SC 2008, Austin, TX, November, 2008
Related
BPMN
b_bprimal