SIMDAT

SIMDAT

http://www.simdat.org

Research

A workflow is the computerised facilitation or automation of a business, scientific or engineering process, in whole or part. The automation of procedures concern data, documents, information, or tasks that are passed between participants according to a defined set of rules to achieve, or contribute to, an overall goal. Whilst workflow may be manually organised, in practice most workflow is normally encapsulated within the context of an IT system to provide computerised support for the procedural automation. The concept of “Scientific Workflows” – we consider scientific and engineering workflows being equivalent – is as an amalgamation of scientific problem-solving and traditional workflow techniques. Scientific workflows share many features of business workflows, but also go beyond them. Many known workflow results and techniques can be leveraged in scientific settings, and many additional features of scientific applications can be usefully deployed in business settings. Scientific workflows promise to become an important area of research within workflow and process automation, and will lead to the development of the next generation of problem-solving and decision-support environments. Scientific workflows often begin as research workflows and end up as production workflows eventually employed by a large number of users. Early in the lifecycle, they require considerable human intervention and collaboration; later they begin to be executed increasingly automatically. For instance, multidisciplinary simulation or complex data mining operations require the specification of complex workflows that are data and process centric.