Special issue: second international workshop on workflow management in service and cloud computing (WMSC2010)

This special issue of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience contains selected highquality papers from the Second International Workshop on Workflow Management in Service and Cloud Computing (WMSC2010) that was held on 11–13 December 2010 in Hong Kong [1]. The WMSC workshop series aims to provide an international forum for the presentation and discussion of research and development trends regarding workflow support in service and cloud environments. WMSC2010 attracted many international attendants, allowing deep discussion and the exchange of ideas and results related to ongoing research among attendants. Following ICWM2009 on 4 May 4 2009 in Geneva, Switzerland, WaGe2008 on 25 May 2008 in Kunming China and WaGe2007 on 17 August 2007 in Urumqi China; WMSC2010 continues to discuss workflow management in service and cloud environments from different perspectives and areas in order to tackle different potentials for further research and development. Workflow management in distributed computing environments has been under investigation for several years [2–8]. In particular, the special issue titled Workflow in Grid Systems in Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience was a key step [7]. The special issue was edited by Professor Geoffrey C. Fox and Professor Dennis Gannon from Indiana University in USA. A follow-up were the special issues in the same journal for WSGE2006 (first International Workshop on Workflow Systems in Grid Environments), WaGe2007, WaGe2008 and ICWM2009 [9–12]. This WMSC2010 special issue is another follow-up of those special issues in order to further boost the research and development of workflow management and applications. Many research and development efforts have been made in the field of workflow management and applications in distributed service and cloud environments such as [2–8, 13–21]. More and more people from different areas are trying to facilitate the techniques from their respective areas to tackle tough issues in workflow management such as resource scheduling, security, computation reduction, service discovery and composition and data service query issues. Following the special issue of ICWM2009, this special issue continues to accommodate a range of papers from different perspectives and areas such as service computing, cloud computing, authentication/security in order to provide some different views and hints for workflow management research. This special issue contains nine papers based on those that were presented at WMSC2010. They are listed as [22–30]. Research problems in these papers have been analysed systematically, and for specific approaches or models, evaluation has been performed to demonstrate their feasibility and advantages. The nine papers were selected on this basis and also peer reviewed thoroughly. They are summarised in the succeeding text. This paper [22] is a workflow scheduling in dynamic grid environment. The paper defines the workflow scheduling problem and describes the existing heuristic and meta-heuristic-based workflow scheduling strategies in Grids. Then, we propose a dynamic critical path-based adaptive workflow scheduling algorithm for Grids, which determines efficient mapping of workflow tasks to Grid resources dynamically by calculating the critical path in the workflow task graph at every step. Corresponding evaluation is conducted to demonstrate the performance. This paper [23] is about service discovery in elastic cloud computing environment. A QoS-aware service discovery method is investigated for elastic cloud computing in an unstructured P2P network. The method is deployed by two phases, that is, service registering phase and service discovery phase. More specifically, for a peer node engaged in the unstructured P2P network, it firstly registers its