Investigating the Feasibility of Making Contexts Explicit in Designing Cloud Workflow

Cloud workflow allows automating the workflow process through a compilation of known sequences of actions in cloud environment. Current Cloud workflows lack the ability, in the one hand, to capture the contexts during the design phase of Cloud workflows; and in the other hand, to deliver a real-time assistance to help a specific user interact with the system in the selection of the relevant cloud workflow components for his specific need. We propose a context-oriented approach to improve the design phase of cloud workflows. A user-oriented paradigm is presented to make contexts explicit in designing cloud workflows. Context will be made explicit due to the integration of BPEL and Contextual Graphs (CxGs) representation. CxGs representation is the formalism for representing uniformly all the ingredients of design process in cloud workflows, so that users could customize information, formalize their design strategies, and possibly interact with the system to model the cloud workflow. We illustrate our methodology through a case study in virtual screening to testify our investigation study. Finally, we conclude that the method we proposed for making contexts explicit in Cloud workflows could be considered as a successful attempt to address the social and human factors related to the design of Cloud workflows.