Federated Enactment of Workflow Patterns

In this paper we address two research questions concerning workflows: 1) how do we abstract and catalogue recurring workflow patterns?; and 2) how do we facilitate optimisation of the mapping from workflow patterns to actual resources at runtime? Our aim here is to explore techniques that are applicable to large-scale workflow compositions, where the resources could change dynamically during the lifetime of an application. We achieve this by introducing a registry-based mechanism where pattern abstractions are catalogued and stored. In conjunction with an enactment engine, which communicates with this registry, concrete computational implementations and resources are assigned to these patterns, conditional to the execution parameters. Using a data mining application from the life sciences, we demonstrate this new approach.