Approaches to Compute Workflow Complexity

During the last 20 years, complexity has been an interesting topic that has been investigated in many fields of science, such as biology, neurology, software engineering, chemistry, psychology, and economy. A survey of the various approaches to understand complexity has lead sometimes to a measurable quantity with a rigorous but narrow definition and other times as merely an ad hoc label. In this paper we investigate the complexity concept to avoid a vague use of the term `complexity' in workflow designs. We present several complexity metrics that have been used for a number of years in adjacent fields of science and explain how they can be adapted and use to evaluate the complexity of workflows.

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