Introduction

Force Workflow Manager implements a graphical user interface to drive the creation of workflows for the Business Decision System part of the FORCE project. The UI is responsible for creating a workflow file that is then submitted for execution by a command line interface utility, force_bdss.

The UI presents a tree view where the workflow is created. The user must specify

• The Multi Criteria Optimizer to use, and the parameter types it should handle for our investigation.

• the Data Sources to use during the evaluation. Data Sources are entities responsible for extracting, computing or generating specific values specific to our computational investigation.

To define each of the above entities, right click on the appropriate entries in the tree. A dialog will open, providing the available entities that can be added, together with entity specific configuration parameters.

Once defined the workflow, it can be saved for later execution (via “Save…”), or executed (by using “Run workflow…”). A previously saved workflow can be reloaded using “Load…”.

During the execution of the force_bdss, the results are displayed in the table located in the main pane of the GUI. Those results are also displayed in the plot, the user can choose what results to plot and the clicked point in the plot is synchronised with the selected row in the table.

The execution of the force_bdss can be by paused (via “Pause”) and resumed (via the same UI element but with the “Resume” tooltip). The execution can be stopped (via “Stop”), and then force_bdss process is terminated.