Leveraging Legacy Workflow Capabilities in a Grid Environment

A large number of workflow systems are in existence, offering various orchestration capabilities. How to make full use of the legacy workflow capabilities in a grid environment is of importance for saving investments as well as enabling dynamic collaboration and boundary-crossing problem solving. In this paper, we propose a concept model for leveraging and aggregating legacy workflow capabilities. The model contains a general way to describe capabilities of legacy workflow systems, two main abstractions for transparent workflow capability usage and an abstract way for boundary-crossing workflow definition. The presented is evaluated with a case study.