Enacting proactive workflows engine in e-science

Abstract

The dynamic nature and the geographic distribution of scientific resources, require flexible and adaptive computational environment where an in-silico experiment can be executed as a workflow of activities. In this paper, we propose a software environment to dynamically generate domain-specific, agent-based workflow engines from workflow specifications. The workflow engine is a proactive multiagent system -a distributed, concurrent system- whose autonomous components interact in performing the workflow activities in a specific domain. The proposed approach has been implemented on Hermes, agent-based mobile computing middleware, and tested within "Oncology over Internet" project. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.