Comparing structure-oriented and behavior-oriented variability modeling for workflows

Abstract

Workflows exist in many different variants in order to adapt the behavior of systems to different circumstances and to arising user's needs. Variability modeling is a way of keeping track at the model level of the currently supported and used workflow variants. Variability modeling approaches for workflows address two directions: structure-oriented approaches explicitly specify the workflow variants by means of linguistic constructs, while behavior-oriented approaches define the set of all valid compositions of workflow components by means of ontological annotations and temporal logic constraints. In this paper, we describe how both structure-oriented and behavior-oriented variability modeling can be captured in an eXtreme Model-Driven Design paradigm (XMDD). We illustrate this via a concrete case (a variant-rich bioinformatics workflow realized with the jABC platform for XMDD), and we compare the two approaches in order to identify their profiles and synergies. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.