Workflow Management Systems in Distributed Environments

Background

The term ‘workflow’ is used with various meanings depending on the domain in which the term is used. The Workflow Management Coalition’s definition is based on document oriented business processes: “Workflow is the automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules” (Coalition, et al., 1999).

In the Grid community, the term workflow is typically used in the context of electronic services that may, or may not, be distributed. For example “Workflow is a pattern of business process interaction, not necessarily corresponding to a fixed set of business processes. All such interactions may be between services residing within a single data centre or across a range of different platforms and implementations anywhere” (Treadwell, 2005).

In the eScience community, workflow is often used to refer to the use of workflow techniques to support the scientific process, i.e. for performing the activities that take place as part of scientific endeavour in a structured, repeatable and verifiable way. For example, in bioinformatics the scientific process can involve the use of ‘in silico experiments’, where local and remote resources to test a hypothesis, derive a summary or search for patterns (R. Stevens et al., 2003).

In the Business Process Management and Web Services domain, the term ‘workflow’ tends to mean programming and automation of processes that involve software exposed as services. This is applied in a variety of areas, e.g. enterprise application integration, supply chains, and business process automation.