Featuring Automatic Adaptivity through Workflow Enactment and Planning

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.

Although workflow management systems are most applicable when an organization follows standard business processes and routines, any of these processes faces the need for handling exceptions, i.e., asynchronous and anomalous situations that fall outside the normal control flow. In this paper we concentrate upon anomalous situtations that, although unusual, are part of the semantics of workflow applications, and should be specified and monitored coherently; in most real-life applications, such exceptions affect a significant fraction of workflow cases. However, very few workflow management systems are integrated with a highly expressive language for specifying this kind of exception and with a system component capable of handling it. We present Chimera-Exc, a language for the specification of exceptions for workflows based on detached active rules, and then describe the architecture of a system, called FAR, that implements Chimera-Exc and integrates it with a commercial workflow management system and database server. We discuss the main issues that were solved by our implementation, and report on the performance of FAR. We also discuss design criteria for exceptions in light of the formal properties of their execution. Finally, we focus on the portability of FAR on its unbundling to a generic architecture with detached active rules.

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.

Workflow management systems (WfMS) are designed to enable the enactment of business processes, i.e. to extract and maintain the process logic between business applications. Within a workflow management solution, heterogeneous applications are connected through a given workflow definition. Future development efforts must aim to establish interoperability between different WfMS. This leads straight to interoperability problems of two types: in a technical point of view, one WfMS has to be able to abstract from a concrete implementation (programming language, hardware, etc.) of another WfMS. In a semantic point of view, WfMS have to agree on the execution semantics of a workflow definition. We try to cope with the semantic interoperability problem by defining a workflow repository which enables extensible communication between WfMS. To understand the notion and the central function of repositories, a short history of metadata systems is given. Based on a modular architecture of WfMS, a repository is developed and sketched in a CORBA compliant style. This repository shows the expressiveness and the idea of extensibility of our interoperability approach.

Process-Aware Information Systems (PAIS), which include Business Process Management (BPM) systems and Workflow Management systems, have been evolving to fulfill the requirements of increasingly complex business and scientific applications. In spite of all efforts, traditional approaches still struggle to provide a seamless integration between the structural design and implementation of such systems. Formal approaches (e.g. Process Algebras and Petri Net) are sufficient to specify systems that can be formally verifiable, albeit unwieldy to implement. The widespread BPMN notation is remarkably effective and a easy to use tool for modeling despite setting aside implementation aspects. On the other hand, the WS-BPEL is a language for execution control of business process that lacks support for modeling. Furthermore, none of these approaches are ideal to handle adaptive strategies that result in recurrent application structural changes. In this context, based on the WEDflow approach, we present WED-SQL: a transactional based, domain-specific, intermediate declarative language for modeling and implementation of PAIS.

Workflow management systems represent, manage, and execute multistep computational analyses and offer many benefits to bioinformaticians. They provide a common language for describing analysis workflows, contributing to reproducibility and to building libraries of reusable components. They can support both incremental build and re-entrancy—the ability to selectively re-execute parts of a workflow in the presence of additional inputs or changes in configuration and to resume execution from where a workflow previously stopped. Many workflow management systems enhance portability by supporting the use of containers, high-performance computing (HPC) systems, and clouds. Most importantly, workflow management systems allow bioinformaticians to delegate how their workflows are run to the workflow management system and its developers. This frees the bioinformaticians to focus on what these workflows should do, on their data analyses, and on their science.RiboViz is a package to extract biological insight from ribosome profiling data to help advance understanding of protein synthesis. At the heart of RiboViz is an analysis workflow, implemented in a Python script. To conform to best practices for scientific computing which recommend the use of build tools to automate workflows and to reuse code instead of rewriting it, the authors reimplemented this workflow within a workflow management system. To select a workflow management system, a rapid survey of available systems was undertaken, and candidates were shortlisted: Snakemake, cwltool, Toil, and Nextflow. Each candidate was evaluated by quickly prototyping a subset of the RiboViz workflow, and Nextflow was chosen. The selection process took 10 person-days, a small cost for the assurance that Nextflow satisfied the authors’ requirements. The use of prototyping can offer a low-cost way of making a more informed selection of software to use within projects, rather than relying solely upon reviews and recommendations by others.

During workflow design, workflow modelers generally specify the performers of a task by their organizational role. However, during workflow enactment, numerous workers with different skills and expertise may share the same role in an organization, making it hard to select appropriate individuals based merely on the assignment relation between a role and a task. To bridge the gap between abstract roles and real workers, this work proposes a multi-criteria assessment model capable of evaluating the suitability of individual workers for a specified task according to their capabilities, social relationships, and existing tasks. Candidates are ranked based on their suitability scores to support workflow administrators in selecting appropriate workers to perform the tasks assigned to a given role. The proposed assessment model overcomes the lack of role-based task assignment in current workflow management systems.

Software has become a rapidly evolving artifact and Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) are not an exception. WfMSs’ changes may impact key performance indicators or resource consumption levels may change among different versions. Thus, users considering a WfMS upgrade need to evaluate the extent of such changes for frequently issued workload. Deriving such information requires running performance experiments with appropriate workloads. In this paper, we propose a novel method for deriving a structurally representative workload from a given business process collection, which we later use to evaluate the performance and resource consumption over four versions of two open-source WfMSs, for different numbers of simulated users. In our case study scenario the results reveal relevant variations in the WfMSs’ performance and resource consumption, indicating a decrease in performance for newer versions.

Access control is an important protection mechanism for information system. Access control enforces subjects access restrictions to objects. Legitimate users should be allowed to access objects and illegitimate users should be detained from accessing objects. Access control between multi-user and multi-object is the key technique in security management of workflow management systems (WfMS), and the mechanism of the role-based authorization and access control is an effective way to solve the problem. This paper designs a set of practical constraint mechanism of role-based access control for WfMS. After introducing authorization constraint mechanism, a new model of role-based access control, RBACWF, is proposed. The role assignment algorithm, role-assign(tasknumber, pre_ass) , is also given as a key technique in this model. After this, an application example is given to explain the execution of the algorithm. Finally, a practical WfMS based on above designs is supplied. The practice in the system’s design and execution has proved that the authorization mechanism is flexible, the performance of the access security is improved greatly, and it also simplifies the task complexity of security administrator.

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.

Establishing scalable and cross-enterprise workflow management systems (WfMSs) in the cloud requires the adaptation and extension of existing concepts for process management. This paper proposes a scalable and cross-enterprise WfMS with a multitenancy architecture. Especially, it can activate enactment of workflow processes by cloud collaboration. We do not employ the traditional engine-based WfMSs. The key idea is to have the workflow process instance to be self-protected and does not need a workflow engine to secure the data therein. Thus, the process instance discovery and activity execution can be fully independently and distributed. As a result, we can employ the data storage system, Big Table, to store the process instances, which may form a big data. The applying of element-wise encryption and chained digital signature makes it satisfy major security requirements of authentication, confidentiality, data integrity, and nonrepudiation.

Workflow management systems (WfMS) are a special class of information systems (IS) which support the automated enactment of business processes. Meanwhile there are WfMS which allow the execution of tasks using mobile computers like PDA with the ability of wireless data transmission. However, the employment of workflow systems as well as mobile technologies comes along with special security challenges. One way to tackle these challenges is the employment of location-aware access control to enforce rules that describe from which locations a user is allowed to perform which activities. The data model behind access control in termed Access Control Model (ACM). There are special ACM for mobile information systems as well as for WfMS, but no one that addresses mobile as well as workflow specific aspects. In the article we therefore discuss the specific constraints such a model should be able to express and introduce an appropriate ACM. A special focus is on location constraints for individual workflow instances.

Workflow management systems (WfMS) offer a promising technology for the realization of process-centered application systems. A deficiency of existing WfMS is their inadequate support for dealing with exceptional deviations from the standard procedure. In the ADEPT project, therefore, we have developed advanced concepts for workflow modeling and execution, which aim at the increase of flexibility in WfMS. On the one hand we allow workflow designers to model exceptional execution paths already at buildtime provided that these deviations are known in advance. On the other hand authorized users may dynamically deviate from the pre-modeled workflow at runtime as well in order to deal with unforeseen events. In this paper, we focus on forward and backward jumps needed in this context. We describe sophisticated modeling concepts for capturing deviations in workflow models already at buildtime, and we show how forward and backward jumps (of different semantics) can be correctly applied in an ad-hoc manner during runtime as well. We work out basic requirements, facilities, and limitations arising in this context. Our experiences with applications from different domains have shown that the developed concepts will form a key part of process flexibility in process-centered information systems.

A document-driven agent-based approach for business processes management

워크플로우 관리시스템이 폭넓게 사용됨에 따라 조직간의 협업이 증가하고 있다. 워크플로우 시스템의 협업이 증가함에 따라 보안의 중요성이 강조되고 있다. 사용자 인증 워크플로우 시스템간의 안전한 통신 기능 등의 보안 기능은 인터넷상에서 워크플로우 관리시스템의 운영에 영향을 미치고 있지만, 워크플로우 시스템은 협업을 기반으로 보안 프로토콜이 제공되지 않은 실정이다. 따라서 본 논문은 워크플로우 관리시스템의 협업기반 보안 프로토콜을 제안한다. 협업 기반 보안 프로토콜의 제안을 위해서 본 논문은 워크플로우 관리시스템의 보안요구사항을 분석하고, 보안요구사항을 바탕으로 보안 아키텍쳐와 보안 프로토콜을 제시한다. As the collaboration of WFMS(workflow management systems) in enterprises increases, security protocols could be considered a critical factor affecting secure operation of WMFS. The security protocol of WFMS could not reflect the nature of collaboration in WFMS, resulting to collaboration of WFMS on Internet causing the operation problems of WFMS. This study suggests collaboration based security protocols based on the collaboration of WFMS on Internet. To reflect the nature of collaboration in WFMS, this study analyzes security requirements for WFMS. Based on security requirements, this study suggests a security architecture and security protocols for WFMS using security agents.