Ad Hoc Iteration and Re-Execution of Activities in Workflows
The repeated execution of workflow logic is usually modeled with loop constructs in the workflow model. But there are cases where it is not known at design time that a subset of activities has to be rerun during workflow execution. For instance in e-Science, scientists might have to spontaneously repeat a part of an experiment modeled and executed as workflow in order to gain meaningful results. In general, a manually triggered ad hoc rerun enables users reacting to unforeseen problems and thus improves workflow robustness. It allows natural scientists steering the convergence of scientific results, business analysts controlling their analyses results, and it facilitates an explorative workflow development as required in scientific workflows.