Towards Continuous Workflow Enactment Systems

Traditional workflow enactment systems and workflow design processes view the workflow as a one-time interaction with the various data sources, executing a series of steps once, whenever the workflow results are requested. The fundamental underlying assumption has been that data sources are passive and all interactions are structured along the request/reply (query) model. Hence, traditional Workflow Management Systems cannot effectively support business or scientific monitoring applications that require the processing of data streams. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift from the traditional step-wise workflow execution model to a continuous execution model, in order to handle data streams published and delivered asynchronously from multiple sources.