Agent-based integration of Web Services with Workflow Management Systems

Many scientific endeavors, such as molecular biology, have become dependent on big data and its analysis. For example, precision medicine depends on molecular measurements and data analysis per patient. Data analyses supporting medical decisions must be standardized and performed consistently across patients. While perhaps not life-threatening, data analyses in basic research have become increasingly complex. RNAseq data, for example, entails a multi-step analysis ranging from quality assessment of the measurements to statistical analyses. Workflow management systems (WFMS) enable the development of data analysis workflows (WF), their reproduction, and their application to datasets of the same type. However, far more than a hundred WFMS are available, and there is no way to convert data analysis WFs among WFMS. Therefore, the initial choice of a WFMS is important as it entails a lockin to the system. The reach in their particular field (number of citations) can be used as a proxy for selecting a WFMS, but of the about 25 WFMS we mention in this work, at least 5 have a large reach in scientific data analysis. Hence other criteria are needed to delineate among WFMS. By extracting such criteria from selected studies concerning WFMS and adding additional criteria, we arrived at five critical criteria: reproducibility, reusability, FAIRness, versioning support, and security. Another five criteria (providing a graphical user interface, WF flexibility, WF scalability, WF shareability, and computational transparency) we deemed important but not critical for the assessment of WFMS. We applied the criteria to the most cited WFMS in PubMed and found none that support all criteria. We hope that suggesting these criteria will spark a discussion on what features are important for WFMS in scientific data analysis and may lead to developing WFMS that fulfill such criteria.

Information System is one of the key domain in which lot of research has been done in the past few years. Applying Information systems to heterogeneous and distributed environments is one of the current research areas. Business Process Management Systems is the information systems which deal with the administration of tasks in the business processes, organizational structures, or in the related context. The Workflow Management system, the early idea of BPM, controls the workflow in an organization, data transfer, and integration of legacy information systems with existing programs and program modules, delegation of business tasks. Offering task management services especially modeling of business processes and underlying organizations, BPM serves it meaning and incorporates the WFM system. BPM supporting the use of knowledge concerning the awareness/unawareness of integrated software, and analysis of processes and organizational structure in terms of verification, modification, evaluation are key management in BPM system I.INTRODUCTION TO BPM: Combination of corporate restructuring and mergers urged the department and processes to be automated and linked together. Unfortunately it created largely disconnected spaghetti of systems and applications. Business Process Management (BPM) was born from a strong need to streamline internal processes and connections between both internal and external functions. It provides ability to model, monitor, manage and manipulate processes quickly in response to changes in strategy and market forces. BPM is an extension of classical Work Flow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. BPM delivers the maximum utility of legacy system. It is a method for revolutionizing the way the work moves throughout an organization. II.COMPONENTS OF BPM: The four key elements in Business Process Management are: Process modeling, Process rule, Process management, and Process performance analytics. Process modeling: Process modeling describes the flow of information (business process).It helps in building a model of process and mapping into an implementation frame work. Modeling requires a consistent analysis and representation of the processes. It forms the basis for the userspecific process environment. Process Rule: Process Rule is a heart of the BPM. It involves execution of discrete steps & integration of information. A process rules engine is used for this purpose. The engine is to monitor and manage the given steps by providing a flow control over the business process. If a process fails or delayed, a compensated action can be done to rectify. Process Management: Process Management is to correlate business/application events to fundamental business metrics .It enables the organization to monitor and optimize the business process. Once the process has been analyzed, modeled and the associated rules are formed. The next stage involves the visualization and management. Visualization means transaction data ranging from holistic to process-state or client state specific rules. Process Performance Analytics: Process Performance Analytics is a transition data source available for sophisticated management analytics .This data should be available on a retrospective or real-time basis. It should answer to one of the most difficult question like “how much does it cost to process a specific transaction?” By this way BPM mainly addresses four components. They are Work Flow Management, Content and records management Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Business Activity monitoring (BAM). III.RELEVENCE TO SYSTEM INTEGRATION: BPM can be fitted easily on the top of existing IT system. It is the Process rules that governs all the happenings and optimizes the process. BPM will not be able to work without the connectivity provided by the EAI layer. EAI layer provides BPM to gain and measure the value from the investment. On the other hand, BPM provides value to the EAI technology layer of Information technology. BPM layer offers business management the view of the message processing layer. It is used to unlock the value of the information held in the integration layer. It is also used to gather data of every transaction in the lifecycle. IV.APPLICATION OF BPM: BPM can be applied to any application which needs these advantages. BPM reduces unnecessary high losses in time critical transactions, helps to provide any critical information, practical application yield fast ROI ,better control over the information, identifying and maximizing the benefits faster, better analysis and tracking, provides enterprise-wide visibility of business processes, improve the effectiveness of the core operations, provides ability to coordinate interactions between information systems, business process and the people, flexible and easily changed by non-technical business people.

A concept is introduced in this article which has strong practical impact for computer aided system configuration. System configuration is a cumbersome and fault sensitive task while setting up systems in a broad range of business applications like ERP (enterprise resource planning) and other workflow-systems. Given a generic process or workflow model in YAWL-notation (yet another workflow language) or any other process modeling language like business process model and notation or WFMC (workflow management coalition), it could be stated that, by using a set of reduction rules as introduced, it is possible to generate a hierarchically structured tree of sub graphs of the workflow graph-representation. According to the notation used, authors call these sub graphs facts. The tree structure of the graph-representation on one hand and the logical relation between the branches and leafs of the tree on the other can be utilized to create a set of constraints and dependencies among the single facts. Some researchers showed that the nested branches can be associated to (predefined) questions with respect to the configuration of a workflow management system, for instance an ERP-application. They presented an algorithm which dynamically sorts the questions and answers in a maximum efficient configuration path, while working through the corresponding questionnaire. By combining the different elements as facts, constraints on questions, and configuration space, it is thus possible to algorithmically generate the efficient structured and interactive questionnaire for the configuration of workflow systems and algorithmically check the consistency (dead lock free, free of synchronization structural conflict) of the underlying workflow model. The concept was tested in the prototype of the interactive questionnaire for configuration of the web-service based ERP-Application

Workflow management systems, especially web-based workflow management systems, have played an important role in concurrent engineering to support the management of dynamic product development processes over Internet. But most existing workflow systems, however, only provide limited security services such as authentication and authorization of users for workflow applications. A full-fledged flexible authorization scheme—Privilege Management Infrastructure (PMI) is still to be fully integrated with workflow management systems to enhance the security of the workflow applications. In this paper, the security weaknesses of the existing workflow management systems are first analyzed, then two different approaches to integrate PMI with workflow management systems are proposed, and workflow security policy enforcement in workflow systems is also analyzed.

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is a major problem confronting manufacturing organizations that have deployed large-scale enterprise information systems and aim to coordinate inter- and intraorganizational product development, supply-chain, and customer management activities. Successful EAI is a key enabling step toward implementation of viable Product Life-cycle Management (PLM) strategies. Extant EAI technologies, such as distributed object and messaging technologies for communication and ontology-based database schema integration, are tedious to develop and maintain in an organization. Though workflow management systems have enabled process coordination of both manual and system-oriented tasks in organizations, coping with the lack of adaptability and inter-operability in workflow systems is a manual and resource intensive effort. Recent advances in (i) standardized, modular, and distributed software delivery frameworks, such as web services; (ii) standard semantic markup languages for developing domain ontologies; and (iii) intelligent process coordination frameworks promise the development of flexible, responsive, integrated, and organic process management architectures. In this paper, we present an intelligent mediator-based architecture for enabling EAI. Intraorganizational information sources and services are made available via a web-services framework. An Integrated Service Planning and Execution (ISP&E) framework interleaves service composition and execution at the mediator to fulfill service requests. Processes that interleave information gathering and transactional tasks are generated using domain-independent Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) AI planning and a domain-specific ontology and then executed in a scalable and reliable manner. Benefits and limitations of mediator-based frameworks for EAI and topics for further research are discussed based on a prototype development experience.

The paper addresses the problem of flexible Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) in distributed environment. Concerning the serious deficiency of flexibility in the current workflow systems, we describe how our workflow system meets the requirements of interoperability, scalability, flexibility, dependability and adaptability. With an additional route engine, the execution path will be adjusted dynamically according to the execution conditions so as to improve the flexibility and dependability of the system. A dynamic register mechanism of domain engines is introduced to improve the scalability and adaptability of the system. The system is general purpose and open: it has been designed and implemented as a set of CORBA services. The system serves as an example of the use of middleware technologies to provide a fault-tolerant execution environment for long running distributed applications. The system also provides a mechanism for communication of distributed components in order to support inter-organizational WFMS.

Workflow systems are commonly used in industry, commerce and government. They provide computerized support for owners of repetitive, highly standardized business processes, with a means of controlling the execution of instances of those processes according to predefined process templates. However, many real-life business processes are characterized by various forms of unpredictability and uncertainty. For workflow systems to be applicable in these environments therefore, they must incorporate methods of addressing uncertainty, vagueness, variability, exceptional cases and missing information. Methods that have been previously been applied include dynamic instance adaptation, partial completion and case handling - not to mention manual over-riding in the case of exceptions. Intelligent approaches have included stochastic and fuzzy Petri Nets. In this paper, we discuss the further potential of intelligent concepts, in particular rough set theory, for the support of the management of information in workflow systems. Since its introduction in the beginning of the nineteen eighties, rough set theory has gained increasing attention and has established itself as a useful intelligent concept and an important method within soft computing. We show how rough sets can be utilized to set up an early warning system in cases where information is missing in the workflow system. We also show the potential of rough sets to detect excessive or redundant information in a workflow management system's design.

Mobile device has become an essential element in our day-to-day lives, even for connecting to the Internet. Consequently, web service has become extremely important to access internet services through mobile. However, security has become a major concern in the field of Mobile Web services technology and the complexity also arises in the distribution and the integration of the web services. Now-a-days the use of mobile applications customers increases notable. Researchers put on efforts to bring out the state-of-the art in mobile web services with security for accessing web services through mobile devices. However, there is no attempt made so far to secure web services at multi-level. Now-a-days mobile web services with security only are not enough, at the same time mobile web services must be an intelligent. In this paper, we have proposed a novel architecture namely Intelligent, Integrated Secure Mobile Web Services (IISMWS) to access web services through mobile devices in a secured manner.

Workflow management systems (WfMS) are widely used for improving business processes and providing better quality of services. However, rapid changes in business environment can cause exceptions in WfMS leading to deadline violation and other consequences. In these circumstances, one of the crucial tasks for a workflow administrator is to detect any potential exceptions as early as possible so that corrective measures can be taken. However such detections can be extremely complex since a workflow process may consist of various control flow pattern and each pattern has its own way of influencing temporal properties of a task. In this paper, we describe a novel approach for predicting temporal exceptions for loops in concurrent workflows which are required to share limited identical resources. Our approach is divided into two phases; preparation phase and prediction phase. In the preparation phase, temporal and resource constraints are calculated for each task within the workflow schema. In the prediction phase, an algorithm is used to predict potential deadline violations by taking into account constraints calculated from the preparation phase.

Nowadays in many enterprises, for the purpose of efficiency improvement and the automation of the business, the workflow management system of the business process is coming into wide use. However, an individual workflow management system is introduced into each organization so the workflow system is effective as a business support inside a single organization, but it is difficult to apply this management system to coordinate business among more than two organizations. We propose Interworkflow system which coordinates each workflow system among multiple organizations. The Interworkflow system consists of three sub-systems and has a user friendly interface. We report on the fact that we have constructed an actual Interworkflow system that coordinates multiple workflow systems and confirm that it functioned effectively.

Cross-company business processes are common in today’s networked economy and are nowadays often supported by process support systems that integrate the information systems of the different partners based on web service technology. In contrast to earlier Workflow Management Systems, which were often deployed in the controlled environment of a single company, the distributed nature of modern solutions make company-spanning web service processes more susceptible to failures. Therefore, it is desirable to augment the process models already at design time with error-handling behavior such that disrupted process instances can for instance be rolled back or completed on an alternative execution path, if, e.g., an individual service is not reachable.In this chapter, we will give an overview of past and current approaches as well as potential future works to exception handling in web service processes. We start with the concepts that were developed in the area of Workflow Management Systems, continue with error-handling techniques in state-of-the-art process modeling languages and finally give an outlook on future automated approaches to error recovery and repair.KeywordsException HandlingBusiness Process Modeling NotationRepair PlanBPEL ProcessFault HandlerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The activities executed in the scientific environment are extremely dependent on knowledge from their performers. Thus, knowledge management initiatives are very important in this environment. One of the possibilities for improving the knowledge flow is to explore past experiences, resulting from the modeling and execution of previous scientific activities and handled by a workflow management system. This work presents Thoth, a system which aims at knowledge reuse in the scientific environment, during the planning, design and execution of scientific activities. This approach is integrated with a CBR approach, also described in this paper, with workflow systems and the use of ontologies.

Workflow management is aimed at the execution of business processes within an enterprise. Workflow management systems (WfMSs) build an execution platform for business processes in organizations of any size and structure. Performance is an important criteria for the applicability of WfMSs; they have to be scalable to varying load situations. The authors present a modular logical WfMS architecture, which is the basis for configuring the WfMS according to the performance needs of the application environment. Based on this logical architecture they define a data partitioning and replication scheme which allows to replicate and distribute components of the WfMS without raising synchronization efforts. As a consequence, the proposed physical architecture provides scalability.

The design and implementation of a workflow management system is typically a large and complex task. Decisions need to be made about the hardware and software platforms, data structures, algorithms, and the network interconnection of various modules utilized by various users and administrators. These decisions are further complicated by requirements such as flexibility, robustness, modifiability, availability, usability, and scalability. The scalability among them is the most impeccable issue, in recent, as the sizes of workflow systems and its applications are becoming much larger. Also, the organizations are recognizing that the de facto standard of workflow architectures, the activity-oriented workflow architecture that is the joint-flow reference model proposed by OMG, and its off-the-shelf and more prevalent in the near future. In this paper, we propose a solution for the scalability issue – The e-Chautauqua VLSW architecture and system. For the realization of scalable workflow systems, we propose an architecture that is called workcase-oriented workflow enactment architecture, and implement an EJB-based workflow management system preserving the property of the architecture. We analytically and experimentally demonstrate that the architecture gives the best performance for the very large number of workcases (instances of workflow procedures). That is, our analytic results showed that (a) software architecture is as important as hardware architecture for VLSW performance enhancement, and (b) the proposed architecture is much more scalable. Based upon the analytic results, we have conceived the workcase-oriented workflow architecture, and experimentally demonstrated that our system is much better scalable and gives the reasonable performance for the very large workflow applications.

Workflow systems are popular in daily business processing. Since vulnerability cannot be totally removed from a workflow management system, successful attacks always happen and may inject malicious tasks or incorrect data into the workflow system. Referring to the incorrect data further corrupt more data objects in the system, which comprises the integrity level of the system. This problem cannot be efficiently solved by existing defense mechanisms, such as access control, intrusion detection, and checkpoints. In this paper, we propose a practical solution for online attack recovery of workflows. The recovery system discovers all damages caused by the malicious tasks that the intrusion detection system reports and automatically repairs the damages based on data and control dependencies among workflow tasks. We analyze the behaviors of our attack recovery system based on the continuous time Markov chain model. The analytical results demonstrate that our system is practical when the parameters of the system are reasonably designed.