Context-aware Workflow Research Articles

Dynamic context-aware workflow management architecture for efficient manufacturing: A ROS-based case study

The manufacturing industry of the future requires innovative approaches to optimize operational efficiency and adaptability. Integrating context-awareness into workflow management systems has emerged as a promising avenue to enhance efficiency in modern manufacturing processes. This research presents an innovative context-aware workflow management architecture designed to address industry-related challenges and overcome current limitations in the state-of-the-art. The architecture leverages Industry 4.0 standards for asset representation and workflow notation while incorporating a Context Analyzer component for real-time context interpretation. The effectiveness of the proposed solution is demonstrated in a real-world manufacturing setting, specifically in the scenario of collecting work order materials using the Robot Operating System (ROS) technology for robot navigation. The evaluation showcases improvements in task completion rate, resource utilization, and task completion time. These outcomes exemplify the potential benefits of incorporating context-awareness into manufacturing workflows, providing insights for further improvements. Contributions include advancing the understanding of context-aware workflow management, a review of the challenges that cap its adoption in the manufacturing domain, a qualitative comparison of similar approaches, practical implementation of the proposed architecture, evaluation of the context-aware component, and provision of the source code and datasets to the community for future advancement and reproducibility.

Context-aware workflow management for smart manufacturing: A literature review of semantic web-based approaches

Smart Manufacturing Systems (SMS) are software systems that identify opportunities for automating manufacturing operations by using Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services connected to machines. An active challenge of SMS is to satisfy the ever-changing conditions of industries, supply networks, and customer needs. To operate effectively, SMS should be flexible enough to perform automatic or semi-automatic adjustments to manufacturing processes in response to unexpected changes, a feature called context awareness. Recent advances in interpreting context data in the semantic web have permitted SMS to understand the active situation of manufacturing processes. This paper presents a literature analysis of context-aware workflow management approaches in the smart manufacturing domain, with a particular focus on semantic web-based approaches published from 2015 to 2022. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) methodology was applied to analyze the state-of-the-art via the PICOC method. The contributions of this work are (1) an SLR about context-aware workflow management for smart manufacturing systems focusing on semantic web-based approaches, (2) a systematic taxonomy to break down the approaches in conformity based on content and main workflow management function area, and (3) identification of opportunities for improvement in technical features such as context awareness, use case implementation, tools employed, licensing, security, and scalability. A novel architecture and components are also proposed to address the identified active challenges.

A Dynamic Context-Aware Workflow Management Scheme for Cyber-Physical Systems Based on Multi-Agent System Architecture

Although Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) provides a paradigm to accommodate frequent changes in manufacturing sector, modeling and managing operations of CPS are challenging issues due to the complex interactions between entities in the system. Development of an effective context-aware workflow management system to guide the entities in the system is a critical factor to attain the potential benefits of CPS. In this paper, we will address the issue on the design of context-aware workflow management systems for CPS in IoT-enabled manufacturing environment. A CPS consists two parts, the Physical World and the Cyber World. To achieve the goal to design a context-aware information system for CPS, the Cyber World models of the entities in the system are constructed based on discrete timed Petri nets (DTPN) and a multi-agent system architecture in which each entity in the system is modeled as an agent to capture the interactions of entities in CPS. To develop context-aware workflow management systems for CPS, a Configuration/Scheduling Feasibility Problem and a Context Generation Problem in CPS are formulated. A condition for configuration/scheduling feasibility based on transformation of the Cyber World Models is established to develop an algorithm to generate contextual information to guide the operation of CPS. The proposed method is illustrated by examples. A series of experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the practicality of the proposed method in terms of computation time and response time. The results indicate that the computation time and total response time increase polynomially with respect to problem size parameters and show that the proposed method is effective in solving real problems.

An Adaptation of Context and Trust Aware Workflow Oriented Access Control for Remote Healthcare

Traditional discretionary access control (DAC) or mandatory access control (MAC) is not quite effective for remote environment. General role-based access control (RBAC) also has its limitations to control access for applications like remote healthcare due to its static nature. Design of effective access control model is indeed a big challenge for such applications. Fine-grained access control logic capable of adapting changes based on run-time information needs to be considered to meet the requirements of remote healthcare scenarios. In this work, an adaptive access control model is proposed keeping in compliance with state–of-the-art scenario towards ensuring quality of context and trust relationship between owners and users. It focuses on inter-component relationship, where phases are executed either in online or in offline mode to avoid performance bottleneck. Adaptive binding is integrated with application specific workflows. Workflow net models for different scenarios of medical kiosk-based rural healthcare are analyzed to validate proposed access control logic at design time that can reduce the possibility of major faults at run time. Our proposed work supports formal analysis and verification using Workflow Petri Net Designer (WoPeD) tool. Comparative analysis shows how proposed access control model advances the state of art.

The specification and design of secure context-aware workflows

Abstract There are two major concerns in the development of current workflow system. The first is security considerations and the second is context awareness. Modern workflow systems cross the boundaries of organisations, each may have its own security requirements, policies and constraints. Even within one organisation, activities in a workflow system may be executed, in one of its instances, within a platform, but in another instance it may be executed or performed on a different platform with completely different environment. Indeed it may not even be automated. This lends modern workflow systems to be security and context-critical. This is in addition to the fact that some of its activities must satisfy variety of hard timing constraints. Current specification and design languages for workflow systems are inadequate in dealing with context-aware secure workflows. This paper presents a sound wide-spectrum language, CS − F l o w , for the specification and design of context-aware, secure workflow systems. As workflow systems have strong temporal aspects (e.g. activity sequencing, deadline, scheduling constraints, etc.), the proposed CS − F l o w is equipped with a rich set of temporal constructs together with temporal proof rules which can be used to be integrated with temporal expert systems, hence enhancing the capabilities of current workflow software. In addition, CS − F l o w is supported by a proof system which underpins the workflow engine that provides decision service using its state to make some decision and update the workflow state. CS − F l o w therefore provides a sound linkage between expert systems and workflow engines.

Implementation of context-aware workflows with multi-agent systems

Systems in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) need to manage workflows that represent users’ activities. These workflows can be quite complex, as they may involve multiple participants, both physical and computational, playing different roles. Their execution implies monitoring the development of the activities in the environment, and taking the necessary actions for them and the workflow to reach a certain end. The context-aware approach supports the development of these applications to cope with event processing and regarding information issues. Modeling the actors in these context-aware workflows, where complex decisions and interactions must be considered, can be achieved with multi-agent systems. Agents are autonomous entities with sophisticated and flexible behaviors, which are able to adapt to complex and evolving environments, and to collaborate to reach common goals. This work presents architectural patterns to integrate agents on top of an existing context-aware architecture. This allows an additional abstraction layer on top of context-aware systems, where knowledge management is performed by agents. This approach improves the flexibility of AmI systems and facilitates their design. A case study on guiding users in buildings to their meetings illustrates this approach.

Runtime Variability for Context-aware Smart Workflows

In variant-rich workflow-based systems, a major concern for process variability is the context-aware configuration of the variants. This means that context information, not users, drives process configuration. To support context-aware process configuration in a dynamic environment, in which context information is available only at run time, smart workflows must be customized at run time. The LateVa (Late Variability for Context-Aware Smart Workflows) framework lets developers model and manage process variability by composing base models, fragments, and variability models and by deferring binding to run time. Base models and fragments are reusable, thereby reducing the modeling effort for developing variants. LateVa also includes an automated run-time-variability mechanism for context-aware smart workflows.

A Context-aware Workflow System Framework and Scheduling Algorithm

In the pervasive and mobile computing environment, work∞ow and context information are closely linked, work∞ow management system have to interact with a variety of sensors. Therefore, the design and development context-aware work∞ow applications become complex and di‐cult to migrate to other platforms. In order to simplify the development of context-aware work∞ow applications and enhance its portability, a new context-aware work∞ow framework is proposed in this paper. This framework introduced into the context-aware middleware which shielded the various bottom sensors work details for the applications and make the work∞ow applications focus on using high-level context, so as to realize the intelligent work∞ow management. This framework also introduced into an ant colony optimization based scheduling algorithm for context-aware work∞ow. Performance test shows that the algorithm can quickly output scheduling results of the middle-scale problems.

로봇 서비스 개발 및 실행을 지원하는 개발도구

There are many actively researched works on context-aware workflows for developing intelligent robot services. It is possible to describe not only the definition of robot services but also the contextual information of user`s surroundings which can be used as the transition conditions for executing those robot services. Therefore it is required to prepare a context-aware workflow document to support the intelligent robot services. In this paper, we propose a development tool which enables robot service developers to describe context-aware workflow documents and execute them. The tool users can write robot service workflows easily by using intuitive GUI of the tool. In the experiment, we showed processes of writing robot service workflows in scenario format, then automatically documenting and executing them.

Development of context-aware workflow systems based on Petri Net Markup Language

The Petri Net Markup Language (PNML) is originally an XML-based interchange format for Petri nets. Individual companies may specify their process models in Petri nets and exchange the Petri nets with other companies in PNML. This paper aims to demonstrate the capabilities of PNML in the development of applications instead of an industrial interchange format only. In this paper, we apply PNML to develop context-aware workflow systems. In existing literature, different methodologies for the design of context-aware systems have been proposed. However, workflow models have not been considered in these methodologies. Our interests in this paper are to propose a methodology to automatically generate context-aware action lists for users and effectively control resource allocation based on the state of the workflow systems. To achieve these objectives, we first propose Petri net models to describe the workflows. Next, we propose models to capture resource activities. Finally, the interactions between workflows and resources are combined to obtain a model for the whole processes. Based on the combined model, we propose architecture to automatically generate context-aware graphical user interface to guide the users and control resource allocation in workflow systems. We demonstrate our design methodology using a health care example.

Context-aware workflow management for virtual enterprises based on coordination of agents

Although virtual enterprises (VE) make it possible for small flexible enterprises to form a collaborative network to respond to business opportunities through dynamic coalition and sharing of the core competencies and resources, they also pose new challenges and issues. Creation of VE involves dynamically established partnerships between the partners and relies on a flexible coordination scheme. The dynamic organizations formed in VE present a challenge in the development of a new methodology to dynamically allocate re-sources and deliver the relevant information to the right people at the right time. A key issue is the development of an effective workflow management scheme for VE. Multi-agent systems (MAS) provide a flexible architecture to deal with changes based on dynamic organization and collaboration of autonomous agents. Despite the extensive studies and research results on MAS, development of a design methodology to support coordination and operations is critical to the success and adoption of VE. The objectives of this research are to propose a design methodology to facilitate coordination and development of context-aware workflow management systems and achieve effective resource allocation for VE based on MAS architecture. To achieve these objectives, a scheme for coordination of agents is proposed. Petri net models are used in the coordination scheme to describe workflows and capture resource activities in VE. The interactions between agents lead to a dynamic workflow model for VE. Based on the aforementioned model, we propose architecture to dynamically generate context-aware graphical user interface to guide the users and control resource allocation based on the state of VE. An order management example is used throughout this paper to illustrate the proposed design methodology.

A framework for smart workflow services in agricultural environments

To improve work efficiency and productivity in agricultural environment, which may naturally be protean, unpredictable and laborious, many researchers have made attempts to apply information technology in the field of conventional agriculture. Especially, they have great concern toward a reasonable and reliable service control model or architecture to control agricultural works automatically and smartly. This article proposes a framework to support context-aware or smart services in agricultural environments, based on a context-aware workflow model and USN/RFID. The suggested framework is focused on supporting autonomous agricultural services in the fields of growth control, protection against disease and insects, and the output control of the agricultural computing environment using a workflow model which is one of the successful service automation models, using contexts from various sensors in agricultural fields. The proposed framework, based on a context-aware workflow, can be greatly helpful in the development of smart applications or work automation in the field of agriculture.

The context aware workflow execution framework

The development of self-adapting web applications based on composite architectures, such as service-oriented architectures (SOA), is challenged by the lack of support to the specification of explicit adaptation policies for the context aware management of the business, interaction and presentation logics. To address this limitation, we propose a vertical architecture extending SOA with advanced adaptation features. This paper presents the Context Aware Workflow Execution framework (CAWE), which enriches SOA with (1) context-aware workflow management; (2) dialogue management capabilities supporting the adaptation of the interaction with the user and (3) context-dependent user interface generation. This paper also briefly presents a prototype application developed by exploiting the CAWE framework.

유비쿼터스 컴퓨팅 환경에서 로봇 자동화 서비스를 위한 계층적 아키텍처

In ubiquitous computing environments, users want to receive the robot services regardless of various physical status or devices such as time, place, various sensors, and high-performance servers. Thus, the ubiquitous service robots have to provide users with automated services according to situational information that they properly recognize. Beyond these problems, robot software has to establish a foundation to support the functions with the network infrastructure that are not able to be solved by a single independent resource. On the basis of a robot middleware that is capable of minimizing dependencies among hierarchy structures, the robot software also has to provide execution environment to control the flow of robot application services. In this paper, we propose a layered architecture to provide users with automated services through ubiquitous robots. The proposed architecture is based on CAWL (Context-Aware Workflow Language) and RSEL (Robot Services Execution Language). CAWL easily represents the flow of robot services from user application service levels, and RSEL is able to support the composition and reusability of robot services through abstraction of robot device services. In our experiments, we applied the proposed architecture to an example of "booth guide robot service".

Call U Back

Mobile commerce (M-commerce) is an attractive research area due to its relative novelty, rapid growth, and great potential in business applications. Over the last decade, various M-commerce applications have been geared to target mobile users and achieved great success. However, most M-commerce applications are developed by different retailers for special purposes and thus lack fully automated business processes to integrate various existing services. This paper presents a novel infrastructure, Call U Back (CUB), for M-commerce applications. The proposed scheme integrates concepts of agent and context-aware workflow to implement automated trading tasks and compose services dynamically. The context awareness is based on ontology and logic models which derive from a set of descriptive contextual attributes for knowledge sharing and logical inference. Based upon the context-aware workflow analysis, the system will generate automated intelligent agents to conduct commerce transactions on behalf of mobile users. The middleware layer of the CUB server has been implemented. An experimental prototype of the system is under development and testing.

Towards a smart service based on a context-aware workflow model in u-agriculture

This paper proposes a smart service model based on a context-aware workflow model in u-agriculture. The suggested service model uses context information to smartly control whether to execute a service of a flow or not. So, a service flow following the suggested service model can be automatically controlled according to context information from sensors around the agricultural environments. The proposed model supports a flow pattern to reutilise previous flows through an external reference in making a new smart service application. With the flow pattern, users can flexibly compose a smart service flow according to their intention, and can easily merge several small flows into a bigger or new workflow.

복합 워크플로우 서비스를 위한 CAWL 기반 상황인지 워크플로우 시스템

유비쿼터스 환경에서는 사용자의 주변 환경에서 발생할 수 있는 상황이 매우 다양하므로, 이에 대응하기 위한 자동화 서비스의 개발이 요구된다. 그러나 기존의 상황인지 기반 워크플로우 시스템들은 단일 워크플로우 서비스만을 제공할 수 있으므로, 다수의 워크플로우 조합을 통해 복합적이고 다양한 서비스를 제공하는데 제약이 있다. 이를 위해 본 논문에서는 다수의 워크플로우에 존재하는 개별적인 서비스 흐름을 하나의 워크플로우로 통합 표현할 수 있는 상황인지 기반의 워크플로우 언어인 CAWL(Context-Aware Workflow Language)를 기반으로 하는 워크플로우 시스템을 제안한다. 제안하는 시스템은 CAWL를 이용하여 작성한 시나리오를 바탕으로 사용자에게 다양한 복합 워크플로우 서비스를 제공할 수 있다. 또한 각각 존재하는 다수의 워크플로우를 복합 워크플로우 서비스를 구성하기 위한 일부로써 재사용할 수 있으므로, 자동화 서비스 개발의 효율성을 증대시킬 수 있다. There are many complicated situations which could be occurred in users' surroundings, so it is required to develop automation services to provide users with appropriate services in ubiquitous computing environments. However, most of the current context-aware workflow systems express context-aware services only with a single workflow. Therefore, they have difficulties in providing users with various and composite services by combining different workflows. In this paper we propose a CAWL-based context-aware workflow system, where CAWL is a context-aware workflow language to express a composite workflow model by describing individual service workflows. The proposed system can provide users with various composite workflow services based on a service scenario, which is described with CAWL. And by reusing a number of single workflows to construct composite workflow services, it is possible to save time and effort to develop context-aware workflows.

Context-Aware Workflow Management For Intelligent Navigation Applications In Pervasive Environments

Abstract Pervasive computing is auser-centric distributed computing paradigm, allowing users to access their preferred services even while moving around. To make this vision a reality, context-aware workflow management is one of key issues because the context of pervasive applications is changing dynamically. In this paper, we propose a context model for intelligent navigation applications and then present acontext-aware workflow management algorithm (CAWM) which can adaptively adjust workflow execution behaviours based on current context information. The correctness of the CAWM algorithm has been also verified theoretically by formulating it as a Petri-net model. Furthermore, the proposed context model and workflow management algorithm can apply to other applications by simply revising the corresponding context structures only.