SWAN: Smart Workflow Management

Workflows are everywhere in service industry, scientific research, as well as daily life, such as the workflow of scientific experiments, customer service, problem solving, information searching, expert finding, and decision making. Technologies that effectively manage workflows are in high demand in order to accelerate scientific discovery and benefit the society.

 

In this project, we are developing techniques to manage diverse types of workflows.

In terms of workflow characteristics, we manage

  • Regular workflows: Regular workflows have specification (or policy) well-designed that defines workflow processes with input and output information and their execution orders, such as scientific experiments, a car manufacturing process, insurance claim handling, and credit checking.
  • Ad-hoc workflows: Ad-hoc workflows are lack of specifications, and typically consist of impromptu processes and are executed on the fly toward high-level goals, such as help desk problem resolution, question answering in web forums, and information search on web.

In terms of application domain, we manage

  • Scientific workflows, which describes "in-silico" experiments in various scientific domains, such as biology, chemistry, physics. One characteristic of scientific workflows is potentially huge datasets generated from workflow execution.
  • Business workflows or business processes

 

 

Faculty:

            Yi Chen < yi.chen at njit dot edu >

Students:

             Peng Sun

             Ziyang Liu

Alumni:

             Qihong Shao, Michel Kinsy

Collaborator:

             Susan Davidson (UPenn)

             Xifeng Yan (UCSB)

             Shu Tao (IBM)

 

This work is supported in part by NSF grant IIS-0740129, IIS-0915438 and an IBM faculty Award.