Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
9.4 EMERGENCYWORKFLOWMANAGEMENT
Incidents, disasters, and catastrophes cause social disruptions to human
life and significant damage to natural and technological systems [231].
The recent years have witnessed more and more of them including the
very recent one, hurricane “Sandy” affecting the eastern America
especially the states of New York and New Jersey. Therefore, emer-
gency workflow management becomes increasingly important. Such
workflows must be able to grow or shrink to cope with frequent changes
of the course of actions dictated by unexpected incidents. This is totally
different from traditional business and scientific workflows where once
they are established, users just execute them repeatedly without the
necessity of frequent modifications [232]. The need for making many
ad
hoc
changes to emergency workflows calls for the on-the-fly verifica-
tion of the correctness of the evolving workflows [233-235]. The
second difference lies in the difference of users. The emergency
workflow users are predominantly volunteer-based. In the event of a
typical emergency, many volunteers are called on to respond to an
incident. They may not have a good understanding of workflows, not to
mention the underlying principles that are used to build them. There-
fore, an emergency workflow must be designed in such an
intuitive
way
that inexperienced responders are able to follow and use it [233]. Third,
emergency workflows come with a high stake. When an incident occurs,
people depend on them to minimize property damage and save as
many lives as possible. Therefore, no defects are tolerable in them. The
above-mentioned differences pose new challenges to the designers of
such emergency workflows. The application of SOA should be a good
way to help designers achieve the required flexibility and on-the-fly-
verification capability for the correctness of the designed and varying
workflows. Lightweight, easy-to-use, and formal methodologies are the
most welcomed.
