Special Issue: Fourth International Workshop on Workflow Management (ICWM2009)

This special issue of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience contains selected high-quality papers from the Fourth International Workshop on Workflow Management (ICWM2009), which was held on May 4, 2009, in Geneva, Switzerland [1]. The ICWM workshop series aims to provide an international forum for the presentation and discussion of research and development trends regarding workflow support in various environments. ICWM2009 attracted many international attendants, allowing deep discussion and the exchange of ideas and results related to ongoing research among attendants. Following WaGe2008 on May 25, 2008, in Kunming China, WaGe2007 on August 17, 2007, in Urumqi China, ICWM2009 continues to discuss workflow management in various environments from different perspectives and areas in order to tackle different potentials for further research and development. Workflow management in distributed computing environments has been under investigation for several years [2–8]. In particular, the special issue titled Workflow in Grid Systems in Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience was a key step [7]. The special issue was edited by Professor Geoffrey C. Fox and Professor Dennis Gannon from Indiana University in the U.S.A. A follow-up were the special issues in the same journal for WSGE2006 (First International Workshop on Workflow Systems in Grid Environments), WaGe2007 and WaGe2008 [9–11]. This ICWM2009 special issue is another follow-up of those special issues in order to further boost the research and development of workflow management and applications. Many research and development efforts have been made in the field of workflow management and applications in distributed computing environments such as [2–8, 12–21]. More and more people from different areas are trying to facilitate the techniques from their respective areas to tackle tough issues in workflow management in general such as resource scheduling, computation reduction and semantic/knowledge management issues. Following the special issue of WaGe2008, this special issue continues to accommodate a range of papers from different perspectives and areas such as service computing, authentication/security in order to provide some different views and hints for general workflow research. This special issue contains 10 papers based on those that were presented at ICWM2009. They are listed as [22–31]. Research problems in these papers have been analysed systematically, and for specific approaches or models, evaluation has been performed to demonstrate their feasibility and advantages. The 10 papers were selected on this basis and also peer reviewed thoroughly. They are summarized below. Laszewski et al. [22] are about workflow management in health informatics. It describes the eMOLST project in support of Medical Order for Life Sustaining Treatment (MOLST) forms. eMOLST uses IHE specifications for cross enterprise document storage and sharing, patient identification, and user authentication and authorization. The paper provides a security solution to allow SSO from multiple access points for IHE compliant systems. Corresponding evaluation is conducted to demonstrate the feasibility. Tolosana-Calasanz et al. [23] implement an autonomic data streaming service (ADSS) utilizing a timed Reference net simulation for predicting future states of the ADSS. There are two advantages: the Reference net that implements the ADSS and the timed model are coincident, and the second one is that the token distribution obtained from the Petri net implementation can be utilized (as a graphical monitoring tool) to better understand demand for particular types of resources in the system. Liu et al. [24] propose a probabilistic strategy for temporal constraint management which utilizes a novel probability-based temporal consistency model. Specifically, for constraint setting,