Dynamic Workflows for Routine Materials Discovery in Surface Science

The rising application of informatics and data science tools for studying inorganic crystals and small molecules has revolutionized approaches to materials discovery and driven the development of accurate machine learning structure/property relationships. We discuss how informatics tools can accelerate research, and we present various combinations of workflows, databases, and surrogate models in the literature. This paradigm has been slower to infiltrate the catalysis community due to larger configuration spaces, difficulty in describing necessary calculations, and thermodynamic/kinetic quantities that require many interdependent calculations. We present our own informatics tool that uses dynamic dependency graphs to share, organize, and schedule calculations to enable new, flexible research workflows in surface science. This approach is illustrated for the large-scale screening of intermetallic surfaces for electrochemical catalyst activity. Similar approaches will be important to bring the benefits of informatics and data science to surface science research. Lastly, we provide our perspective on when to use these tools and considerations when creating them.