Scientific Process Automation and Workflow Management

We introduce and describe scientific workflows, i.e., executable descriptions of automatable scientific processes such as computational science simulations and data analyses. Scientific workflows are often expressed in terms of tasks and their (data ow) dependencies. This chapter first provides an overview of the characteristic features of scientific workflows and outlines their life cycle. A detailed case study highlights workflow challenges and solutions in simulation management. We then provide a brief overview of how some concrete systems support the various phases of the workflow life cycle, i.e., design, resource management, execution, and provenance management. We conclude with a discussion on community-based workflow sharing.