This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easil...

Big Data analytics in science and industry are performed on a range of heterogeneous data stores, both traditional and modern, and on a diversity of query engines. Workflows are difficult to design and implement since they span a variety of systems. To reduce development time and processing costs, automation is needed. We present PAW, a platform to manage analytics workflows. PAW enables workfl...

Service-oriented workflows in the scientific domain are commonly composed as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), formed from a collection of vertices and directed edges. When orchestrating service-oriented DAGs, intermediate data are typically routed through a single centralised engine, which results in unnecessary data transfer, increasing the execution time of a workflow and causing the engine to...

Distributing workflow tasks among high performance environments involves local processing and remote execution on clusters and grids. This distribution often needs interoperation between heterogeneous workflow definition languages and their corresponding execution machines. A centralized Workflow Management System (WfMS) can be locally controlling the execution of a workflow that needs a grid W...

This paper describes the design and implementation of an open source embedded workflow framework (EMWF). By providing a language for specifying embedded workflow processes and light weight engines for executing and managing them, EMWF enables us to design and build service robots and assistive robotic devices on workflow-based architecture. The embedded process definition language supported by ...

Petri nets are widely used for modeling and analyzing workflows. Using the token-game semantics, Petri net-based workflow models can be analyzed before the model is actually used at run time. At run time, a workflow model prescribes behavior of a reactive system (the workflow engine). But the token-game semantics models behavior of closed, active systems. Thus, the token-game semantics behavior...

The bioinformatics community is characterized by an extreme interdisciplinarity– biologists are working together with mathematicians, who are working together with physicians, who are working together with computer scientists. Along with this heterogeneous background comes a plethora of different approaches to modeling bioinformatic workflows. The tools used to tackle this challenge have long b...

Running scientific workflows in distributed environments is motivating the definition of provenance gathering approaches that are loosely coupled to the workflow execution engine. This kind of approach is interesting because it allows both storage and access to provenance data in an integrated way, even in an environment where different workflow management systems work together. Therefore, we h...

This paper proposes using file system custom metadata as a bidirectional communication channel between applications and the storage system. This channel can be used to pass hints that enable cross-layer optimizations, an option hindered today by the ossified file-system interface. We study this approach in context of storage system support for largescale workflow execution systems: Our workflow...

In the past few years, the traditional client/server architecture for workflow has exhibited many weaknesses, as such an architecture seriously degrades system performance, greatly lacks scalability in a dynamic environment and rigidly restricts human beings. Unfortunately, current research only partly addressed the above difficulties and the problems are still unsolved. In this paper, an innov...