Workflow Management Systems

In this report a concept and framework for distributed structural organizational design for workflow management systems in global business is presented. Very few approaches of workflow management address dynamic change in (international) organizational structures. Processes describe the activities which are performed, an enterprise model describes the actors and the structure of the organization. This report on Groupware-based Organization Design (GroupOrga) analyzes cicumstances of today's organizational design approaches. An innovative approach to organizational design for workflow and office systems will be presented, which is team oriented and groupware based. The report will make clear that structural organizational design requires the complete knowledge about the organization -a requirement that cannot be met by one person. A team-approach supported by groupware will be discussed, as well the architecture and toolcentered implementation aspects of the system.

Das Workgroup Computing Competence Center Paderborn befaßt sich mit Forschung, Prototyping, Produktentwicklung, Systemeinführung, Projektabwicklung, Technologietransfer, Consulting und Schulung bei Groupware-basierten Anwendungen für betriebliches Informationsmanagement. Gegenstand sind insbesondere Businessund Technologie-Frameworks für Office Systeme, Workgroup Computing, Workflow Management, Projekt Management und Connectivity-Systeme in Client-Server Architekturen. Das Workgroup Computing Competence Center Paderborn besteht aus gemeinsamen Arbeitsteams an der Universität Paderborn und der PAVONE Informationssysteme GmbH Paderborn.

The GroupOrga (Groupware-based Organization design) project examines how structural organization design takes place in its traditional form and also provides a vision of an organization design process. Its objective is to present an architecture of an organization design application environment that supports workflow management systems (WfMS). After specifying the term “collaboration” in the context of GroupOrga, we discuss how collaboration technology can enable better organizational design and design procedures. As a contribution to the WfMS discussion, we examine how traditional WfMS are constructed in respect to organizational design processes and point out their current weaknesses. The paper explains the linkage between WfMS and organization design systems. As a major focus, the varying types of workflow and organization design users in an organization are examined and their involvement in the organizational design process is discussed. The result is a scale of user classes tha...

In this paper, we introduce a new class of continuous functions as an application of $\Lambda$-generalized closed sets (namely $\Lambda_g$-closed set, $\Lambda$-g-closed set and $g \Lambda$-closed set) namely $\Lambda$-generalized continuous functions (namely $\Lambda g$-continuous, $\Lambda$-g-continuous and $g \Lambda$-continuous) and study their properties in topological space.

Processes such as tendering, ordering, delivery, and paying are executed by several parties in almost all supply chains. However, none of these parties has a proper overview over the whole set of activities executed. Therefore, none of the parties can take the lead in business process redesign. Business processes are often not described in an explicit manner, and therefore they are not available for analysis. However, in the information system of each supply chain party, partial information about the business process are recorded. We claim that the overall distributed process can be induced, by using this partial information of all involved parties. In this paper we present an overview of methods available to discover processes across supply chains, based on the assumption that there is a common point of reference at all involved parties, e.g. an order number. Such an induced or discovered process enables analysis across the supply chain, and can become an important tool to facilitate business process redesign in networked organizations.

Contemporary workflow management systems are driven by explicit process models, i.e., a completely specified workflow design is required in order to enact a given workflow process. Creating a workflow design is a complicated time-consuming process and, typically, there are discrepancies between the actual workflow processes and the processes as perceived by the management. Therefore, we have developed techniques for discovering workflow models. The starting point for such techniques is a so-called "workflow log" containing information about the workflow process as it is actually being executed. We present a new algorithm to extract a process model from such a log and represent it in terms of a Petri net. However, we will also demonstrate that it is not possible to discover arbitrary workflow processes. In this paper, we explore a class of workflow processes that can be discovered. We show that the -algorithm can successfully mine any workflow represented by a so-called SWF-net.

Many of todayÕs information systems are driven by explicit process models. Workflow management systems, but also ERP, CRM, SCM, and B2B, are configured on the basis of a workflow model specifying the order in which tasks need to be executed. Creating a workflow design is a complicated time-consuming process and typically there are discrepancies between the actual workflow processes and the processes as perceived by the management. To support the design of workflows, we propose the use of workflow mining. Starting point for workflow mining is a so-called ''workflow log'' containing information about the workflow process as it is actually being executed. In this paper, we introduce the concept of workflow mining and present a common format for workflow logs. Then we discuss the most challenging problems and present some of the workflow mining approaches available today.

In this work multi phase flow and erosion analysis were done via simulations in AVL's Workflow Manager with FIRE Solver CFD application, for standard diesel and two alternative biofuels, FAME and DME, inside different nozzle models and with various boundary conditions. Driving force for fluid flow is static pressure difference between inlet and outlet. Analysis criteria were: phase volume fraction distribution due to cavitation, mass flow rate, absolute velocity profile vs. nozzle model narrow channel height and erosion MDPR. Nozzle model consists of narrow channel with sharp (type I) or rounded (type Y) inlet section, with or without downstream placed target, so there was a total of four different model geometries. Simulation results showed that cavitation was present in almost all cases and that clear difference between three observed fuels can be seen. Mass flow in channel type I was lower than one in channel type Y. When comparing three observed fuels, it was noticed that DME fuel usually had highest velocity, but lowest mass flow rate. Contrary to DME, FAME fuel showed highest mass flow rate despite lowest velocity. When designing fuel nozzles, cavitation and cavitation erosion should always be considered. Nozzles in which less cavitation occured, achieved higher mass flow rates for same boundary conditions. When comparing simulation results and physical properties of observed fuels, it can be concluded that density is a leading term in determining mass flow rate. Also, erosion model predicts more intensive MDPR value near narrow channel exit.

Quality in construction projects is important in terms of providing safe, durable end products at an economical cost, but evaluation of the efficiency of Quality Management Systems (QMS) is a long-standing incongruent issue due to haphazard measures and various implementation processes. The present paper will explore QMS effectiveness in the construction sector by conducting a literature and industry review to determine the outcomes of performance and identifying factors that lead or contribute to success or failure. The goals of the study include assessing the average QMS elements, such as ISO 9001 guidelines and TQM operations, gauging performance through metrics, including defect elimination, cost reduction, and conformity rates, and proposing the strategies to improve the performance of the system. The paper takes a statistical approach to designing the research findings using data aggregated in peer-reviewed journals and reports in the industry. Findings indicate QMS results in 15-25 percent defect eliminated and 10-15 percent cost savings and leadership and training are the main facilitators albeit obstacles remain such as resource insufficiency. The work will also provide construction professionals with a useful reference point in terms of assessing the effectiveness of QMS, facilitate the compatibility when applied together with information technology such as BIM, and facilitate a more sustainable activity by avoiding unnecessary pieces of work on rework.

Quality in construction projects is important in terms of providing safe, durable end products at an economical cost, but evaluation of the efficiency of Quality Management Systems (QMS) is a long-standing incongruent issue due to haphazard measures and various implementation processes. The present paper will explore QMS effectiveness in the construction sector by conducting a literature and industry review to determine the outcomes of performance and identifying factors that lead or contribute to success or failure. The goals of the study include assessing the average QMS elements, such as ISO 9001 guidelines and TQM operations, gauging performance through metrics, including defect elimination, cost reduction, and conformity rates, and proposing the strategies to improve the performance of the system. The paper takes a statistical approach to designing the research findings using data aggregated in peer-reviewed journals and reports in the industry. Findings indicate QMS results in 15-25 percent defect eliminated and 10-15 percent cost savings and leadership and training are the main facilitators albeit obstacles remain such as resource insufficiency. The work will also provide construction professionals with a useful reference point in terms of assessing the effectiveness of QMS, facilitate the compatibility when applied together with information technology such as BIM, and facilitate a more sustainable activity by avoiding unnecessary pieces of work on rework.

In silico scientific experiments encompass multiple combinations of program and data resources. Each resource combination in an execution flow is called a scientific workflow. In bioinformatics environments, program composition is a frequent operation, requiring complex management. A scientist faces many challenges when building an experiment: finding the right program to use, the adequate parameters to tune, managing input/output data, building and reusing workflows. Typically, these workflows are implemented using script languages because of their simplicity, despite their specificity and difficulty of reuse. In contrast, Web service technology was specially conceived to encapsulate and combine programs and data, providing interoperation between applications from different platforms. The Web services approach is superior to scripts with regard to interoperability, scalability and flexibility issues. We have combined metadata support with Web services within a framework that supports scientific workflows. While most works are focused on metadata issues to manage and integrate heterogeneous scientific data sources, in this work we concentrate on metadata support to program management within workflows. We have used this framework with a real structural genomic workflow, showing its viability and evidencing its advantages.

Hadoop serves as a robust framework tailored for the storage and processing of vast data volumes across clusters. Its foundation lies in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) for data storage, complemented by the MapReduce paradigm for data processing. MapReduce, functioning as a parallel computing framework, operates adeptly on distributed clusters to manage large-scale data processing tasks. Within this framework, scheduling emerges as a pivotal aspect, influencing the overall system's performance and efficiency. The essence of scheduling in MapReduce lies in enhancing performance, minimizing response times, and optimizing resource allocation. This paper undertakes a systematic exploration of existing scheduling algorithms, offering a fresh classification and detailed examination of each category. Furthermore, the analysis delves into the core principles, objectives, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of these scheduling algorithms.

This paper combines ideas from separate research streams to identify high-level design choices related to the scope and content of enterprise models. It summarizes the work system modeling method (WSMM), an extension of a long research stream related to seeing enterprises as interacting work systems. It applies a recently developed framework for describing theoretical perspectives to articulate numerous aspects of a work system perspective on enterprise modeling (EM). This paper's main contributions include its approach for exploring conceptual or theoretical starting points for enterprise modeling and its expanded view of a work system perspective on enterprise modeling.

This conceptual contribution responds to the invitation to the DIGIT 2015 Call for Papers "to reflect on and move forward from the dominant stream of research work on technology acceptance." The dominant stream of research is basically about antecedents and correlates of adoption and continuation of use for hardware/software artifacts. This paper uses work system theory and several of its extensions to identify directions for adoption research that have been realized partially, but not nearly to the extent possible. It focuses on three general issues: 1) what adoption means in the context of work systems, 2) how adoption occurs, and 3) how adoption entities change after adoption, including decisions by work system participants about whether and how to comply or not comply with prescribed practices that are often taken-for-granted as the result of adoption processes.

Discussion and debate about the meaning of service, service system, IT service, and related to terms has proven inconclusive and frustrating. This preliminary draft provides insights about the nature of the problem and tries to disentangle ideas and expectations related to three portrayals of service. In a nutshell, efforts to understand service as a unitary concept tend to go in circles due to overlapping references to different but overlapping portrayals and contexts. This paper identifies three separate but somewhat overlapping portrayals of service, services as acts, services as outcomes, and services as software entities. Then it introduces a work system perspective on service to explore whether and how the three portrayals of service can be reconciled. This paper proceeds in layers. The first layer introduces three portrayals of service and cites examples to show that one or several of those portrayals is present in most published definitions of service. The second layer introduces the main ideas in work system theory (WST) as a summary of a work system perspective on systems in organizations. The third layer explains how a work system perspective provides a path for seeing the relationship between the three portrayals of service. The fourth layer answers a number of specific questions related to the ideas in the first three layers. This sequence might seem like a long slog, but it ultimately shows that the important point is not an individual definition of service or some other term, but rather a system of concepts that makes sense as a whole and that applies to most practical situations.

In the past few years there has been an increasing interest in workflow applications as a way of supporting complex business processes in modern corporations. Given the nature of the environment and the technology involved, workflow applications are inherently distributed and pose many interesting challenges to the system designer. In most cases, a client/server architecture is used in which knowledge about the processes being executed is centralized in one node to facilitate monitoring, auditing, and to simplify synchronization. In this paper, we explore a novel distributed architecture, Exotica/FMQM, for workflow systems in which the need for such a centralized database is eliminated. Instead, we use persistent messages as the means to store the information relevant to the execution of a business process. Our approach is to completely distribute the execution of a process so individual nodes are independent. The advantages of this approach are increased resilience to failures and greater scalability and flexibility of the system configuration.

Workflow Management Systems (WFMSs) automate the execution of business processes in environments encompassing large numbers of users distributed over a wide geographic area and using heterogeneous resources. Current implementations allow the definition and controlled execution of complex and long lived business processes as the basis for an enterprise-wide collaborative system but, in most cases, the autonomy of the users is greatly restricted due to architectural and design considerations. In particular, existing systems are built around a centralized server. As a result, users need to maintain an uninterrupted connection with the server to perform the different tasks assigned to them. This is a severe restriction, especially when considering the emergence of mobile computing, and the increase in use of laptops and small computers which are connected to the network only occasionally and which will, undoubtedly, be the tool of choice for many users. This paper addresses the problem of supporting disconnected workflow clients in large workflow management systems while still preserving the correctness of the overall execution and allowing coordinated interactions between the different users regardless of their location.

Industry 4.0 is a key strategic trend of the economy. Virtual factories are key building blocks for Industry 4.0 where product design processes, manufacturing processes and general collaborative business processes across factories and enterprises are integrated. In the context of EU H2020 FIRST (vF Interoperation suppoRting buSiness innovaTion) project, end users of vFs are not experts in business process modelling to guarantee correct collaborative business processes for realizing execution. To enable automatic execution of business processes, verification is an important step at the business process design stage to avoid errors at runtime. Research in business process model verification has yielded a plethora of approaches in form of languages and tools that are based on Petri nets family and temporal logic. However, no report specifically targets and presents a comparative assessment of these approaches based on criteria as one we propose. In this paper we present an assessment of the most common verification approaches based on their expressibility, flexibility, suitability and complexity. We also look at how big data impacts the business process verification approach in a data-rich world.

Discovering business rules from business process models are of advantage to ensure the compliance of business processes with business rules. Furthermore it provides the agility of business processes in case of business rules evolution. Current approaches are limited on types of rules that can be discovered. This paper analyses the expression power of some popular business process modelling languages in embedding business rules in its presentation and provides indicators to extract various types of business rules from business process models.

Collaborative business services represent the collaboration of business service domains across organisations. This collaboration is characterised by the interdependencies of business activities and business resources between business partners. These interdependencies require information and process sharing within constraints to ensure consistency across organisations. Most approaches for collaborative business service analyses fall into two categories: 1) those based on business-process modelling perspectives using a business process modelling language; 2) those based on collaboration patterns such as network topology or interaction patterns. However, no studies examine the connections between the two categories even though collaboration patterns influence business-process management. In this paper, we investigate the sharing of different aspects of business objects such as data value and behaviours in the context of collaborative services. We formalise this approach with a collaboration framework, and present constraints emerged. To implement the framework, we develop a model of collaborative business services and evaluate its effectiveness.

This work describes the concept of workflow modeling using Workflow-nets and Generalized Stochastic Petri Nets (GSPN) for the Digital Publishing business process and how the attributes of dependability are measured in a quan- titative form. In our novel approach, these are measured from the workflow model itself, improving the analysis of a workflow model. Applying these measure concepts to the general Digital Publishing pre-press process provides a bet- ter workflow management in this area since this process is based on its trustworthiness. Once the methodology for workflow modeling is introduced, the results for a case study on the preflight stage of the Digital Publishing work- flow are presented.

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have deeply changed our understanding of cellular processes by delivering an astonishing amount of data at affordable prices; nowadays, many biology laboratories have already accumulated a large number of sequenced samples. However, managing and analyzing these data poses new challenges, which may easily be underestimated by research groups devoid of IT and quantitative skills. In this perspective, we identify five issues that should be carefully addressed by research groups approaching NGS technologies. In particular, the five key issues to be considered concern: (1) adopting a laboratory management system (LIMS) and safeguard the resulting raw data structure in downstream analyses; (2) monitoring the flow of the data and standardizing input and output directories and file names, even when multiple analysis protocols are used on the same data; (3) ensuring complete traceability of the analysis performed; (4) enabling non-experienced users to run analyses through a graphical user interface (GUI) acting as a front-end for the pipelines; (5) relying on standard metadata to annotate the datasets, and when possible using controlled vocabularies, ideally derived from biomedical ontologies. Finally, we discuss the currently available tools in the light of these issues, and we introduce HTS-flow, a new workflow management system conceived to address the concerns we raised. HTS-flow is able to retrieve information from a LIMS database, manages data analyses through a simple GUI, outputs data in standard locations and allows the complete traceability of datasets, accompanying metadata and analysis scripts.

The coordination of cooperative workflows occurs in parallel to the definition of a common communications infrastructure among organizations. In this paper, we present a library of coordination mechanisms modeled with Petri Nets. These mechanisms specify and control the interaction between workflow processes. The separation between activities and dependencies, managed by the coordination mechanisms, allows the reuse of these mechanisms in other environments and also the use of different coordination policies in the same environment.

Diagnosis to enhance fault analysis. We propose to add Diagnostic Web Services to the set of Web Services providing the overall service, acting as supervisors of their execution, by identifying anomalies and explaining them in terms of faults to be repaired. This approach poses the basis for the development of specialized recovery and compensation techniques aimed at addressing different problems, which could not be otherwise discriminated.

In this paper, an approach based on interorganizational WorkFlow nets and on possibilistic Petri nets is proposed to deal with communication failures in business processes. Routing patterns and communication protocols existing in business processes are modeled by interorganizational WorkFlow nets. Possibilistic Petri nets with uncertainty on the marking and on the transition firing are considered to express in a more realistic way the uncertainty attached to communication failures. Combining both formalisms, a kind of possibilistic interorganizational WorkFlow net is obtained. An example of communication failure at a process monitoring level that precedes the presentation of a paper at a conference is presented.

Collaborative business services represent the collaboration of business service domains across organisations. This collaboration is characterised by the interdependencies of business activities and business resources between business partners. These interdependencies require information and process sharing within constraints to ensure consistency across organisations. Most approaches for collaborative business service analyses fall into two categories: 1) those based on business-process modelling perspectives using a business process modelling language; 2) those based on collaboration patterns such as network topology or interaction patterns. However, no studies examine the connections between the two categories even though collaboration patterns influence business-process management. In this paper, we investigate the sharing of different aspects of business objects such as data value and behaviours in the context of collaborative services. We formalise this approach with a collaboration framework, and present constraints emerged. To implement the framework, we develop a model of collaborative business services and evaluate its effectiveness.

and ICON (Aouad et al., 1995) (for building design and construction management). It is also the subject of standardization efforts such as STEP (ISO/TC184/SC4, 1994), and more recently the IAI (see: ) In order to support collaborative engineering, however, it is important not only to share information, but also to manage that information in a manner that actively promotes integration. This paper describes the central models underlying the COMMIT project, which is defining mechanisms to handle a number issues relating to the management of information to support decision-making in collaborative projects. The project is being carried out in consultation with a well-established steering group comprising standardisation bodies, industrials and researchers. However, the paper describes ongoing research, and comments are invited regarding the models to allow improvements to be made over the remaining life of the project.

The productivity and profitability of organizations depend on the efficacy of their business processes. Monitoring the performance of these processes in delivering organizational value propositions provides a basis for critical managerial decision-making activities including work scheduling, capacity planning, and process design or refinement . Business processes are automated in whole or in part using workflow management systems (WFMS), where documents, information, and activities flow between participants according to existing process models and rules . Workflows are abstractions of business processes that are typically modeled as deterministic, action-event sequences in WFMS . Organizations employ tactical WFMS with sampling-based schemes or data-driven operational WFMS using firsthand observations for process evaluation. Managing the performance and quality of business processes based on accurate performance measures has direct impact on the success of an organization .

In this paper, we propose a Model-Driven Approach for the specification and the execution of cloud service flexible workflow applications. We define two flexibility patterns based on BPMN that deals with changes of resource requirements for workflow. The workflows are built on an abstract level, using a BPMN model for the specification of the cloud service workflow structure based on flexibility patterns, and the state-chart diagram for the specification of the cloud service workflow behaviour. The execution process is supervised by a control system which is responsible for making decisions on the execution of the workflow based on the behaviour defined by the state-chart diagram.

In distributed environment the changes and challenges faced by composite web services in their network environment are enormous. The primary issue in these systems is to distribute the load among various components of the composite web services to improve the performance through minimizing the response time. In this paper, we present a methodology to estimate the load sharing among composite web services using traditional workflow concept combined with game theory approach. In addition, we have developed a simulation model and observed that the results are promising for a better understanding of workload sharing among individual web services. We obtained the stable solution for ensuring the cooperation of the web services which further helps in capacity planning in composite web services network environment.

This study systematically analyzes the significance of end-of-life activities (shukatsu) and life-improvement activities (shukatsu) from the perspective of well-being enhancement in contemporary society, utilizing the PlantUML C4 model.
Against the backdrop of the advancing aging society and diversification of values, this research clarifies the role that end-of-life and life-improvement activities play in personal life planning by structuring them into four hierarchical levels: Context, Container, Component, and Code, and elucidating their interrelationships.
The analysis reveals that end-of-life and life-improvement activities are not merely administrative procedures but comprehensive activities that contribute to well-being enhancement through deepening self-understanding, reconstructing family relationships, and promoting social participation.
This study presents design guidelines for support systems for end-of-life and life-improvement activities and provides a theoretical foundation for realizing a sustainable society.
Keywords
Well-being, End-of-life activities (shukatsu), Life-improvement activities (shukatsu), C4 model, PlantUML, System design, Aging society, Life planning

In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of two mechanisms for fault-tolerance and recovery for complex scientific workflows on computational grids. We present our algorithms for over-provisioning and migration, which are our primary strategies for fault-tolerance. We consider application performance models, resource reliability models, network latency and bandwidth and queue wait times for batch-queues on compute resources for determining the correct fault-tolerance strategy. Our goal is to balance reliability and performance in the presence of soft, real-time constraints like deadlines and expected success probabilities, and to do it in a way that is transparent to scientists. We have evaluated our strategies by developing a Fault-Tolerance and Recovery (FTR) service and deploying it as a part of the Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) production infrastructure. Results from real usage scenarios in LEAD show that the failure rate of individual steps in workflows decreases from about 30% to 5% by using our fault-tolerance strategies.

Scientific workflows are extensively used to support the management of experimental and computational research by connecting together different data sources, components and processes. However, certain issues such as the ability to check the appropriateness of the processes orchestrated, management of the context of workflow components and specification, and provision for robust management of intellectual concerns are not addressed adequately. Hence, it is highly desirable to add features to uplift focus from low level details to help clarify the rationale and intent behind the choices and decisions in the workflow specifications and provide a suitable level of abstraction to capture and organize intellectual concerns and map them to the workflow specification and execution semantics. In this paper, we present Omnispective Analysis and Reasoning (OAR), a novel framework for providing the above features and enhancements in scientific workflow management systems and processes. The OAR framework is aimed at supporting effective capture and reuse of intellectual concerns in workflow management.

In this paper, we present a novel approach to contextualize course design by the application of the Omnispective Analysis and Reasoning (OAR) framework to map the goals and intent of a course to its design and delivery. Effective design and delivery of courses requires alignment between planned learning activities and learning outcomes. However, it is generally not trivial to translate learning outcomes into course design, particularly so when using a Learning Management System (LMS). This is further compounded by the differences between the language of teaching theory and that used by the LMS. Thus, there is a need to effectively capture the rationale for design decisions in a course and map them to desired outcomes. We illustrate the application of the OAR framework with a process for translating a learning objective into course design using the Moodle LMS.

Scientific workflows are extensively used to support the management of experimental and computational research by connecting together different data sources, components and processes. However, certain issues such as the ability to check the appropriateness of the processes orchestrated, management of the context of workflow components and specification, and provision for robust management of intellectual concerns are not addressed adequately. Hence, it is highly desirable to add features to uplift focus from low level details to help clarify the rationale and intent behind the choices and decisions in the workflow specifications and provide a suitable level of abstraction to capture and organize intellectual concerns and map them to the workflow specification and execution semantics. In this paper, we present Omnispective Analysis and Reasoning (OAR), a novel framework for providing the above features and enhancements in scientific workflow management systems and processes. The OAR framework is aimed at supporting effective capture and reuse of intellectual concerns in workflow management.

We describe the design, functionality, and implementation of a data ow query language (DFQL), that graphically represents a query as a directed acyclic data ow graph. The language is well suited for application domains such as scienti c databases, where data analysis and visualization need to be tightly coupled with data retrieval, and the relationships between the entities are ill-de ned. Being a functional language, unlike most visual query languages that are declarative, DFQL provides the ability to combine data retrieval, analysis, and visualization, intuitively in a single query. We have implemented this language in a system being used in a long term data-intensive pavement research project.

A lot of work is devoted to analysing architectures for coordinating the behaviour of individual agents. However, providing agents with abilities to migrate continues to be a highly challenging problem. We propose a novel multi-agent framework, called Agent-based Migration (AM). We begin by defining the principal objective, which is the migration phenomenon applied, in our case, to distributed calculation of prime numbers. We present the AM architecture in detail. Then, we introduce different types of migration and the communication scheme. We also conduct a set of experiments in two environments: 4 heterogeneous computers and 45 (almost) homogeneous computers. Specifically, we are looking for a way to find optimal configurations for migration in both environments. The conclusion from this work is that introducing propagation to a system in a form of agent migration in both networks could considerably decrease the execution time according to used algorithms and established assumptions.

Nowadays many software development frameworks implement Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) as a mean of automating the test of interactive systems under construction. Automated testing helps to simulate user's actions on the User Interface and therefore check if the system behaves properly and in accordance to scenarios that describe functional requirements. How ever, tools supporting BDD run tests on im plemented Usa-Interfaces and are a suitable alternative for assessing functional requirements in later phases of the development process. Howeva-, even when BDD tests can be written in early phases of the development process they can harclly be used with specifications of User Interfaoes such as prototypes. To address this problem, this paper proposes to raise the aoetraction level of both system interactive behaviors and User Interfaces by means of a formai ontology that is aimed at supporting test automation using BDD. The paper presents an ontology and an ontology-based approach for automating the test of functional requirements of interactive systems. We demooetrate the feasibility of this ontohgy-based approach to assess functional requirements in prototypes and full.fledge ap plications through an illustrative case stucly of e-oommeroe applications for buying ftight tickets.

Today, cloud services, such as virtual machines, are traded directly at fixed prices between consumers and providers on platforms, e.g. Amazon EC2. The recent development of Amazon's EC2 spot market shows that dynamic cloud markets are gaining popularity. Hence, autonomous multi-round bilateral negotiations, also known as bazaar negotiations, are a promising approach for trading cloud services on future cloud markets. They play a vital role for composing service chains. Based on a formal description we describe such service chains and derive different negotiation types. We implement them in a simulation environment and evaluate our approach by executing different market scenarios. Therefore, we developed three negotiation strategies for cloud resellers. Our simulation results show that cloud resellers as well as their negotiation strategies have a significant impact on the resource allocation of cloud markets. Very high as well as very low mark-ups reduce the profit of a reseller.

Cloud computing provides a cheap and elastic platform for executing large scientific workflow applications, but it rises two challenges in prediction of makespan (total execution time): performance instability of Cloud instances and variant scheduling of dynamic schedulers. Estimating the makespan is necessary for IT managers in order to calculate the cost of execution, for which they can use Cloud simulators. However, the ideal simulated environment produces the same output for the same workflow schedule and input parameters and thus can not reproduce the Cloud variant behavior. In this paper, we define a model and a methodology to add a noise to the simulation in order to equalise its behavior with the Clouds' one. We propose several metrics to model a Cloud fluctuating behavior and then by injecting them within the simulator, it starts to behave as close as the real Cloud. Instead of using a normal distribution naively by using mean value and standard deviation of workflow tasks' runtime, we inject two noises in the tasks' runtime: noisiness of tasks within a workflow (defined as average runtime deviation) and noisiness provoked by the environment over the whole workflow (defined as average environmental deviation). In order to measure the quality of simulation by quantifying the relative difference between the simulated and measured values, we introduce the parameter inaccuracy. A series of experiments with different workflows and Cloud resources were conducted in order to evaluate our model and methodology. The results show that the inaccuracy of the makespan's mean value was reduced up to 59 times compared to naively using the normal distribution. Additionally, we analyse the impact of particular workflow and Cloud parameters, which shows that the Cloud performance instability is simulated more correctly for small instance type (inaccuracy of up to 11.5%), instead of medium (inaccuracy of up to 35%), regardless of the workflow. Since our approach requires collecting data by executing the workflow in the Cloud in order to learn its behavior, we conduct a comprehensive sensitivity analysis. We determine the minimum amount of data that needs to be collected or minimum number of test cases that needs to be repeated for each experiment in order to get less than 12% inaccuracy for our noising parameter. Additionally, in order to reduce the number of experiments and determine the dependency of our model against Cloud resource and workflow parameters, the conducted comprehensive sensitivity analysis shows that the correctness of our model is independent of workflow parallel section size. With our sensitivity analysis, we show that we can reduce the inaccuracy of the naive approach with only 40% of total number of executions per experiment in the learning phase. In our case, 20 executions per experiment instead of 50, and only half of all experiments, which means down to 20%, i.e. 120 test cases instead of 600.

Workflow scheduling on the Grid becomes more challenging when multiple scheduling criteria are considered. Existing studies provide different approaches to the multi-criteria Grid workflow scheduling problem, and address different variants of the problem. A profound understanding of the problem's nature can be an important step towards more generic scheduling approaches. Based on the related work and on our own experience, we propose several novel taxonomies of the problem, considering five facets: workflow model, scheduling criteria, scheduling process, resource model, and task model. We make a survey of the existing related work, and classify it according to the proposed taxonomies, identifying the most common use cases and the areas that have not been sufficiently explored yet.

The emerging trend of Federated Cloud models enlist virtualization as a significant concept to offer a large scale distributed Infrastructure as a Service collaborative paradigm to end users. Virtualization leverage Virtual Machines(VM) instantiated from user specific templates labelled as VM Images (VMI). To this extent, the rapid provisioning of VMs with varying user requests ensuring Quality of Service(QoS) across multiple cloud providers largely depends upon the image repository architecture and distribution policies. We discuss the possible state-of-art in VMI storage repository and distribution mechanisms for efficient VM provisioning in federated clouds. In addition, we present and compare various representative systems in this realm. Furthermore, we define a design space, identify current limitations, challenges and open trends for VMI repositories and distribution techniques within federated infrastructure.

Realistic, relevant, and reproducible experiments often need input traces collected from real-world environments. We focus in this work on traces of workflows-common in datacenters, clouds, and HPC infrastructures. We show that the state-of-the-art in using workflow-traces raises important issues: (1) the use of realistic traces is infrequent, and (2) the use of realistic, open-access traces even more so. Alleviating these issues, we introduce the Workflow Trace Archive (WTA), an open-access archive of workflow traces from diverse computing infrastructures and tooling to parse, validate, and analyze traces. The WTA includes >48 million workflows captured from >10 computing infrastructures, representing a broad diversity of trace domains and characteristics. To emphasize the importance of trace diversity, we characterize the WTA contents and analyze in simulation the impact of trace diversity on experiment results. Our results indicate significant differences in characteristics, properties, and workflow structures between workload sources, domains, and fields.

Virtualization represents an essential technology in Cloud computing, which allows virtual machines (VM) to be executed within their own environment on top of physical hardware. The modern methods for software delivery are utilizing the concept of Vitual Machine as a efficient tool for software packaging. Typically, VMs are created using specific templates that are stored in proprietary repositories, thus leading to provider lock-in and reduced portability in the cases of simultaneous usage of multiple federated Clouds. Unfortunately, the current state-of-the-art does not provide any efficient means for streamlined management of VM images across multiple repositories, especially within federated Cloud environments. In this paper we present a novel multi-objective middleware for distributed VMI repositories in federated Cloud environment. The middleware has been designed to provide easy to use interface capable of receiving unmodified and functionally complete VM images from its users, and transparently distribute them to a specific Cloud infrastructure in a federation with respect to their size, configuration, and geographical distribution, such that they are loaded, delivered, and executed faster and with improved QoS compared to their current behaviour.

• A review of multiple QoS parameter workflow scheduling. • A new multiple QoS algorithm with quadratic complexity for workflow scheduling. • Similar performances of search-based algorithms in a small fraction of the time. • Results for randomly generated graphs as well as for real-world applications.

The Pellucid project is developing an adaptable and customisable platform for enabling experience management in public organisations. Starting with a study of the three pilot applications, a uniform framework has been developed for experience management, based on the generation of 'active hints' that are presented to the user according to working context. Working context encompasses both position in the work process and domain-specific characteristics, typically similarity to previous cases. The paper discusses the applications and the framework.

A Framework for Experience Management in e- ... Simon Lambert and Alvaro Arenas CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot, UK SCLambert@rl.ac.uk AEArenas@rl.ac.uk ... Sabine Delaitre and José Mena Raposo, SADIEL, SA, c/ Isaac Newton s/n, Edificio Sadiel, ...