A WEB ACCESSIBLE SCIENTIFIC WORKFLOW SYSTEM FOR PERFORMANCE MONITORING: DESIGN AND EXAMPLES

Performance monitoring - the generation of information on site performance through data acquisition and analysis – is a challenge being faced by a multitude of government agencies as well as private industry. The challenge at hand is how to perform performance monitoring in a cost effective, timely, rigorous and scientifically defensible manner while meeting multiple stakeholder needs. Such stakeholders will typically include regulators, owners, scientists and the general public, each of which have different information objectives (which could. be regulatory, performance related, process related or impact related).

The commonality for all these objectives in that the information generation process should be transparent, reproducible and auditable. Historically the problem with performance monitoring related information generation process is that – due to the decoupled nature between the components of performance monitoring (data acquisition. data management, data processing, data interpretation/result generation and result delivery) – these objectives are not met. Over the last several years we have developed and implemented a web accessible scientific workflow system which allows for a systematic way in which to meet these objectives. By providing a web frontend to a central backend (which can tap into several auditable data and model sources) data becomes easily auditable, tools become available to end users, and stakeholder specific site information can be efficiently generated and delivered. We will present and discuss both the general philosophy behind this system as provide several examples of system implementations.