A policy-based resource instantiation mechanism to automate software process management
SEKE '02 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Software engineering and knowledge engineering
ICGT '02 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Graph Transformation
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Specifications of workflow, process, and activity coordination systems focus on the assignment of work to human and software agents and the dataflow required to support those activities. The runtime behaviors of these systems vary widely depending upon the availability of agents and other needed resources. Thus the precise specification of resources needed by, and available to, a system is an important basis for reasoning about and optimizing system behavior. Previous resource models used in management and workflow have lacked the rigor to support powerful reasoning and optimization. Some resource models for operating systems have been quite rigorous, but overly narrow in scope. This paper presents a meta-model for creating precise models of such resource types as humans, tools, computation platforms, and data, and the various associations between these types that are needed to support intelligent allocation of these resources. We also present examples of the use of this meta-model. This paper also describes a prototype resource allocation and management system that implements these approaches. This prototype is designed to be a separable, orthogonal component of a system for execution of processes defined as hierarchies of steps, each of which incorporates a specification of resource requirements.