Databases, workflows and the grid in a service oriented environment

As the Grid moves towards adopting a service-oriented architecture built on Web services, coupling between processes will rely on secure, reliable, and transacted messages and be supported by databases. We have built a generic toolkit targeted at design engineers, which provides convenient methods to access a grid-enabled repository. In this paper we report how we have developed it further, and integrated it into a workflow toolkit to support a range of activities that design engineers have previously attempted to perform by multiple ad-hoc methods in the workflows used to improve designs. It also presents opportunities for improving the process of design search in a variety of ways that would have been otherwise hard to implement. We show the potential of our grid-enabled data repository in the context of workflow management, engineering optimisation process monitoring and steering