Extended UML activity diagram for composing Grid services workflows

Abstract

This paper focuses on how to model and compose workflow applications of Grid services without considering lower level description of the Grid environment. To reach this objective, we propose a model-driven approach (MDA) for developing workflow applications from existing Grid services. The workflows are built on an abstract level with semantic and syntactic descriptions of services available on the Grid using UML activity diagram language. As there are particular needs for modeling composed workflows of Grid services, we propose to extend the UML activity diagram notation. These extensions deal with additional information allowing a systematic composition of workflows and containing appropriate data to describe a Grid service. These data are useful for the execution of the resulting workflow.