Workflow Management from a Scheduling Perspective

In this report, we examine the workflow management process from a scheduling perspective. Recognizing that effective workflow management requires an ability to efficiently allocate limited resources to tasks over time, we concentrate on characterizing this domain as a continuous distributed scheduling problem and on understanding the requirements and opportunities for providing workflow scheduling support within multi-agent environments. Our goals are twofold: (1) to relate the characteristics of the workflow management problem to scheduling models previously developed for other domains, and (2) to identify the issues and challenges surrounding application of previously developed scheduling technology to this problem.