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Understanding Workflow Management Systems

A workflow management system (WMS) provides an infrastructure for defining, executing, and monitoring scientific workflows. It coordinates the operation of individual components in a workflow and handles technical details like incompatible data formats. WMSs allow researchers to specify experiments as workflows without needing computer science expertise, enabling more complex and data-intensive simulations through combining multiple tools into a research analysis pipeline.

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Michael Daneizo
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25 views1 page

Understanding Workflow Management Systems

A workflow management system (WMS) provides an infrastructure for defining, executing, and monitoring scientific workflows. It coordinates the operation of individual components in a workflow and handles technical details like incompatible data formats. WMSs allow researchers to specify experiments as workflows without needing computer science expertise, enabling more complex and data-intensive simulations through combining multiple tools into a research analysis pipeline.

Uploaded by

Michael Daneizo
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

A workflow management system is a computer system that manages and defines a

series of tasks within an organisation to produce a final outcome or outcomes.


Workflow Management Systems allow you to define different workflows for different
types of jobs or processes. So, for example, in a manufacturing setting, a design
document might be automatically routed from designer to a technical director to
the production engineer. At each stage in the workflow, one individual or group is
responsible for a specific task. Once the task is complete, the workflow software
ensures that the individuals responsible for the next task are notified and receive
the data they need to execute their stage of the process. Workflow management
systems also automate redundant tasks and ensure uncompleted tasks are followed
up.
[Link]

Workflow Management System (WMS) is a piece of software that provides an infrastructure to


setup, execute, and monitor scientific workflows. In other words, the WMS provide an
environment where in silico experiments can be defined and executed.

An important function of an WMS during the workflow execution, or enactment, is the


coordination of operation of individual components that constitute the workflow – the process
also often referred to as orchestration.

As research becomes more data-intensive and more reliant on the use of computers, larger
volumes of experimentation data are recorded quicker and with greater precision. This trend has
spurred significant increase in complexity of scientific simulation software. Many tools only
perform a small well-defined task, thus necessitating that several of them are joined in a pipeline
to model a useful experiment.

Additional difficulties arise from the need to deal with the incompatible data formats that various
services produce or consume. It is evident that considerable amount of computer science
knowledge is required to overcome the outlined problems; however, domain scientists across
disciplines do not have sufficient relevant expertise.

Scientific workflows and WMSs have emerged to solve this problem and provide an easy-to-use
way of specifying the tasks that have to be performed during a specific in silico experiment. The
need to combine several tools into a single research analysis still holds, but technical details of
workflow execution are now delegated to Workflow Management Systems.

[Link]

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