Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/192991

Title

A probabilistic strategy for temporal constraint management in scientific workflow systems

Author(s)

Liu, Xiao;  Ni, Zhiwei;  Chen, Jinjun;  Yang, Yun

Abstract

In scientific workflow systems, it is critical to ensure the timely completion of scientific workflows. Therefore, temporal constraints as a type of QoS (Quality of Service) specification are usually required to be managed in scientific workflow systems. Specifically, temporal constraint management includes two basic tasks: setting temporal constraints at workflow build-time and updating temporal constraints at workflow run-time. For constraint setting, the current work mainly adopts user-specified temporal constraints without considering the system performance. Hence, it may result in frequent temporal violations which deteriorate the overall workflow execution effectiveness. As regards constraint updating, although not well investigated, so far is in fact of great importance to workflow management tasks such as workflow scheduling and exception handling. In this paper, with a systematic analysis of the above issues, we propose a probabilistic strategy for temporal constraint management which utilizes a novel probability-based temporal consistency model. Specifically for constraint setting, a negotiation process between the client and the service provider is designed to support the setting of coarse-grained temporal constraints and then automatically derive the fine-grained temporal constraints; for constraint updating, the probability time deficit/redundancy propagation process is proposed to update run-time fine-grained temporal constraints when workflow execution is either ahead of or behind the schedule. The effectiveness of our strategy is demonstrated through a case study on an example scientific workflow process in our scientific workflow system.

Publication type

Journal article

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology. Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies

Source

Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience: selected papers from the Fourth International Workshop on Workflow Management (ICWM2009), Geneva, Switzerland, 04 May 2009, Vol. 23, no. 16 (Nov 2011), pp. 1893-1919

Publication year

2011

FOR Code(s)

0805 Distributed Computing

Keyword(s)

Probabilistic strategy;  Quality of service;  Scientific workflow system;  Temporal constraint setting;  Temporal constraint updating;  Temporal constraints;  Workflow QoS

Publisher

John Wiley & Sons

ISSN

1532-0626

Publisher URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cpe.1739

Copyright

Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Research Projects

Novel cloud computing based workflow technology for managing large numbers of process instances, Australian Research Council grant number LP0990393

Peer reviewed