Application-Objected Workflow Management System Based on Abstract Service

• Main Authors: Jiazao Lin, Zhili Zhao, Shoubo Li, Huajian Zhang, Lifen Li, Caihong Li, Lian Li
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Abstract Service; Computer applications; Computer interfaces; Computer networks; Computer science; Concrete; Control systems; Grid computing; Large-scale systems; Web services; Workflow management software
• ISSN: 2160-4908
• DOI: 10.1109/GCC.2009.32

Since numerous large-scale scientific applications executed on grids are expressed as complex scientific workflows, workflow management has appeared as one of the most important service in grid environment in past few years. However, most of the management systems do not fully hide the complexity of the underlying orchestration language. Meanwhile, grid environment is dynamic when each scientist involves in different requirements to submit their computational jobs to heterogeneous executing environment. Therefore, in order to solve the issues of complexity, heterogeneity and dynamism, in this paper we developed application-objected workflow management system based on abstract service. The abstract service is an abstract combination service for a group Web service with similar function. And we presented service center, which contains a large number of abstract services to form a virtual uniform view to shield the diversity among various web services. We also developed a visual workflow designer, which allows scientists to orchestrate an abstract workflow by just dragging or dropping the graphical representations of abstract services to (or from) the canvas. Especially, the requirement description document (RDD) was proposed to describe the special demands of individual computational jobs in XML grammar. And we implemented a workflow application management system (WFAMS), which translates abstract workflow in well-defined order to concrete workflow, and manages, controls and decomposes the workflow, and then combines the scientistpsilas relational data and submits workflow to job pool in grid platform. Finally, the solutions to the key problems in the workflow management system are considered, including the definition of abstract workflow, the mechanism to support failure handling, the workflow template and the mechanism to isolate the control flow and data flow.