Workflow management in the grid era: A goal-driven approach based on process patterns

Issue title: New tendencies on agents and grid environments

Guest editors: Pilar Herrero and Gonzalo Méndez

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Jiang, Jinlei^{a; b; *} | Zhang, Shaohua^a | Schlichter, Johann^b | Yang, Guangwen^a

Affiliations: [a] Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, P. R. China | [b] Institut fuer Informatik, Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748 Garching, Germany

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 10 6279 6162; Fax: +86 10 6279 7141; E-mail: jjlei@tsinghua.edu.cn

Abstract: Workflow management in the grid era faces many challenges both related to workflow modeling and workflow execution. To deal with the challenges, the paper argues that the traditional process-driven workflow management paradigm should be replaced by a goal-driven one and proposes a corresponding implementation approach. The contributions of the paper are as follows: (1) a concept of process pattern is put forward that is an effective means not only for procedural knowledge representation and sharing but also for expertise exchange between domain experts and computer scientists; (2) based on process patterns, a goal-driven workflow framework is designed that incorporates semantic Web technologies and artificial intelligent (AI) planning techniques and that can (semi-)automatically generate a workflow on the fly according to the requirements of users and the running context.

Keywords: Process pattern, workflow generation, AI planning, ontology, grid computing

DOI: 10.3233/MGS-2009-0132

Journal: Multiagent and Grid Systems , vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 325-343, 2009