A User-Defined Exception Handling Framework in the VIEW Scientific Workflow Management System

Abstract

With the advances of e-Science, scientific workflow has become an important tool for researchers to explore scientific discoveries. Although several scientific workflow management systems (SWFMSs) have been developed, their support of exception handling is still limited. In this paper, we introduce our approach of exception handling in the VIEW scientific workflow management system. We propose an exception handling language for scientific workflows based on our workflow model. Both syntax and semantics rules of our language are presented. Different exception handling primitives, such as retry, alternative, and repeat, are supported in our language with flexibility for their composition to provide a sophisticated and flexible exception handling mechanism. Moreover, two exception handling algorithms and the architecture design for exception handling in VIEW are also presented.