A Workflow Management System Guide

TL;DR

This paper reviews and compares various workflow management tools used in scientific analysis to aid researchers in selecting appropriate solutions for transparency, reproducibility, and data preservation.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of workflow management tools and offers recommendations tailored to different scientific use cases.

Findings

Identifies key criteria for workflow management tools

Provides a comparative analysis of selected tools

Recommends suitable tools for specific research needs

Abstract

A workflow describes the entirety of processing steps in an analysis, such as employed in many fields of physics. Workflow management makes the dependencies between individual steps of a workflow and their computational requirements explicit, such that entire workflows can be executed in a stand-alone manner. Though the use of workflow management is widely recommended in the interest of transparency, reproducibility and data preservation, choosing among the large variety of available workflow management tools can be overwhelming. We compare selected workflow management tools concerning all relevant criteria and make recommendations for different use cases.