The design of a workflow recommendation system for workflow as a service in the cloud

A cloud workflow system is designed to provide WaaS (Workflow as a Service) which harnesses the power of cloud computing for efficient and cost-effective workflow execution. The current cloud workflow systems are mainly used by people who possess the knowledge about the business processes such as the process structures and functional/non-functional requirements because they need to create the executable workflow applications by themselves. However, most end-users do not acquire such kind of knowledge and thus limits the system usability and hinders the implementation of complete WaaS. To address this problem, this paper proposes the design of a novel online workflow recommendation system which can help end-users to create their own executable workflow applications by only providing some keywords to describe their requirements without the specific workflow modeling process. The system framework and its core components are illustrated in this paper. A detailed case study on an online ordering business workflow is demonstrated to successfully prove the feasibility of our system design.