EWOKS: The ESRF Workflow System
How does the EWOKS workflow system represent the next major improvement to automating the EBS beamlines?
EWOKS is a workflow system developed at ESRF that helps to structure experiments on the ESRF beamlines, helping data collection and exploitation. Its goal is to provide a common way of doing beamline automation and online data processing combined with a scheduling system that tracks everything that has been or is being executed.
Each type of experiment requires a specific workflow for automation, which need to be implemented case by case but the following are common features for all use cases:
–Reproducibility, re-usability and data provenance;
-Collaboration;
-Traceability;
-Scheduling.
The EWOKS approach fits these automation requirements where the recipe describes a workflow of tasks with data transfer between the tasks and links that can be conditional. An optional GUI (Graphical User Interface) facilitates creation and use of workflows and aims to target the beamline automation of data collection, real-time data interpretation and storage within a dedicated portal.
EWOKS provides a common and shared language, which means that developments for one beamline can be rapidly reused elsewhere.
Figure: New workflow “Two Mesh Scans” developed using the Ewoks web interface.