A Workflow Management System Guide

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.