Towards Flexible Event-Handling in Workflows through Data States

Despite recent advances in many real-time and workflow management systems (WFMS), event-handling is still a manual or semi-automated task. The integration of automated event processing with workflows remains an open research challenge to both academic and industrial communities. In this work, we propose a concrete approach that logs interactions between workflow component activities in the form of data states that accurately and efficiently store necessary information for event-handling. Our approach (called WED-flow) explicitly represents various dependencies and constraints of a WFMS in sophisticated data states. Due to the availability of this large amount of historic information, our approach is able to support a flexible event-handling in WFMS. In this paper we present definitions for workflow management systems that incorporate events, and characterize such systems using the WED-flow approach. We also present a scientific workflow example in genetic testing to illustrate the advantages of integrating events with workflow through the WED-flow approach.