Database Support for Workflow Management: The WIDE Project presents the results of the ESPRIT WIDE project on advanced database support for workflow management. The book discusses the state of the art in combining database management and workflow management technology, especially in the areas of transaction and exception management. This technology is complemented by a high-level conceptual workflow model and associated workflow application design methodology. In WIDE, advanced base technology is applied, like a distributed computing model based on the corba standard. The usability of the WIDE approach is documented in this book by a discussion of two real-world applications from the insurance and health care domains. Database Support for Workflow Management: The WIDE Project serves as an excellent reference, and may be used for advanced courses on database and workflow management systems.
The motivation behind the conception of this monograph was to advance scientific knowledge about the design and control of workflow processes. A workflow pr- ess (or workflow for short) is a specific type of business process, a way of or- nizing work and resources. Workflows are commonly found within large admin- trative organizations such as banks, insurance companies, and governmental agencies. Carrying out the tasks of a workflow in a particular order is required to handle one type of case. Examples of cases are mortgage applications, customer complaints, and claims for unemployment benefits. A workflow used in handling mortgage applications may contain tasks for recording the application, specifying a mortgage proposal, and approving the final policy. The monograph concentrates on four workflow-related issues within the area of Business Process Management; the field of designing and controlling business processes. The first issue is how workflows can be adequately modeled. Workflow mod- ing is an indispensable activity to support any reasoning about workflows. Diff- ent purposes of workflow modeling can be distinguished, such as system ena- ment by Workflow Management Systems, knowledge management, costing, and budgeting. The focus of workflow modeling in this monograph is (a) to support simulation and analysis of workflows and (b) to specify a new workflow design. The main formalism used for the modeling of workflows is the Petri net. Many - isting notions to define several relevant properties have been adopted, such as the workflow net and the soundness notion.
Workflows may be defined as abstractions used to model the coherent flow of activities in the context of an in silico scientific experiment. They are employed in many domains of science such as bioinformatics, astronomy, and engineering. Such workflows usually present a considerable number of activities and activations (i.e., tasks associated with activities) and may need a long time for execution. Due to the continuous need to store and process data efficiently (making them data-intensive workflows), high-performance computing environments allied to parallelization techniques are used to run these workflows. At the beginning of the 2010s, cloud technologies emerged as a promising environment to run scientific workflows. By using clouds, scientists have expanded beyond single parallel computers to hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines. More recently, Data-Intensive Scalable Computing (DISC) frameworks (e.g., Apache Spark and Hadoop) and environments emerged and are being used to execute data-intensive workflows. DISC environments are composed of processors and disks in large-commodity computing clusters connected using high-speed communications switches and networks. The main advantage of DISC frameworks is that they support and grant efficient in-memory data management for large-scale applications, such as data-intensive workflows. However, the execution of workflows in cloud and DISC environments raise many challenges such as scheduling workflow activities and activations, managing produced data, collecting provenance data, etc. Several existing approaches deal with the challenges mentioned earlier. This way, there is a real need for understanding how to manage these workflows and various big data platforms that have been developed and introduced. As such, this book can help researchers understand how linking workflow management with Data-Intensive Scalable Computing can help in understanding and analyzing scientific big data. In this book, we aim to identify and distill the body of work on workflow management in clouds and DISC environments. We start by discussing the basic principles of data-intensive scientific workflows. Next, we present two workflows that are executed in a single site and multi-site clouds taking advantage of provenance. Afterward, we go towards workflow management in DISC environments, and we present, in detail, solutions that enable the optimized execution of the workflow using frameworks such as Apache Spark and its extensions.
Workflow management systems (WFMS) are enjoying increasing popular ity due to their ability to coordinate and streamline complex organizational processes within organizations of all sizes. Organizational processes are de scriptions of an organization's activities engineered to fulfill its mission such as completing a business contract or satisfying a specific customer request. Gaining control of these processes allows an organization to reengineer and improve each process or adapt them to changing requirements. The goal of WFMSs is to manage these organizational processes and coordinate their execution. was demonstrated in the first half The high degree of interest in WFMSs of the 1990s by a significant increase in the number of commercial products (once estimated to about 250) and the estimated market size (in combined $2 billion in 1996. Ensuing maturity product sales and services) of about is demonstrated by consolidations during the last year. Ranging from mere e-mail based calendar tools and flow charting tools to very sophisticated inte grated development environments for distributed enterprise-wide applications and systems to support programming in the large, these products are finding an eager market and opening up important research and development op portunities. In spite of their early success in the market place, however, the current generation of systems can benefit from further research and develop ment, especially for increasingly complex and mission-critical applications.
Database Support for Workflow Management: The WIDE Project presents the results of the ESPRIT WIDE project on advanced database support for workflow management. The book discusses the state of the art in combining database management and workflow management technology, especially in the areas of transaction and exception management. This technology is complemented by a high-level conceptual workflow model and associated workflow application design methodology. In WIDE, advanced base technology is applied, like a distributed computing model based on the corba standard. The usability of the WIDE approach is documented in this book by a discussion of two real-world applications from the insurance and health care domains. Database Support for Workflow Management: The WIDE Project serves as an excellent reference, and may be used for advanced courses on database and workflow management systems.
As the information contained in databases has become a critical resource in organizations, efficient access to that information and the ability to share it among different users and across different systems has become an urgent need. The interoperability of heterogeneous database systems-literally, the ability to access information between or among differing types of databases, is the topic of this timely book. In the last two decades, tremendous improvements in tools and technologies have resulted in new products that provide distributed data processing capabilities. This book describes these tools and emerging technologies, explaining the essential concepts behind the topics but focusing on practical applications. Selected products are discussed to illustrate the characteristics of the different technologies. This is an ideal source for anyone who needs a broad perspective on heterogeneous database integration and related technologies.
"This book aids managers in the transformation of organizations into world-class competitors through business process applications"--Provided by publisher.
