BPEL4Pegasus: Combining Business and Scientific Workflows

Business and scientific workflow management systems (WfMS) offer different features to their users because they are developed for different application areas with different requirements. Research is currently being done to extend business WfMSs by functionality that meets requirements of scientists and scientific applications. The idea is to bring the strengths of business WfMSs to eScience. This means great effort in re-implementing features already offered by scientific WfMSs. In our work, we investigated another approach, namely combining business and scientific workflows and thus harnessing the advantages of both. We demonstrate a prototype that implements this idea with BPEL as business workflow language and Pegasus as scientific WfMS. Our motivation is the fact that the manual work to correctly install and configure Pegasus can be supervised by a BPEL workflow to minimize sources of failures and automate the overall process of scientific experimenting.