What do we do now? Workflows for an unpredictable world

• We examine workflows that support highly dynamic missions with real-world interactions.
• We consider situations when workflows must be adapted beyond the bounds of their original assumptions.
• Our goal is to support agile operations and pipeline sharing by choosing relevant substitute actions when assumptions change.
• We describe a series of suitability functions for discovering candidate alternatives, without the strong assumptions required by previous work.

Workflow systems permit organization of many individual subtasks into a cohesive whole, in order to accomplish a specific mission. For many government and business missions, these systems are used to manage repetitive processes, such as large data-processing and exploitation pipelines. Government missions with strong interactions with the real world are extremely dynamic, as are all missions dealing with error-prone or changing data streams. We contribute a vision for discovery of new steps in adaptive workflow systems, suitability functions that can discover candidate alternatives, and a way forward for sourcing options for decision-makers, without the strong assumptions required by previous work. As data-processing workflows are shared, the sharing entities may find that certain parts of the workflow must be adapted to the new environment of mission. Extremely dynamic environments call for capabilities that support agile operations and pipeline sharing by making it possible to choose relevant actions when a situation invalidates the assumptions of current execution. We adapt some work in schema matching towards this problem, citing key differences between the two sets of challenges.