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.
The enactment model is formalized using gamma-calculus that is able to
grasp the semantics of an autonomously evolving system. 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.
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
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