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There's actually a subfield called 'scientific workflow systems' (SWS). An example of such a system is Kepler [1]. What the author(s) ask at the end of the article seems to me basically that they want process provenance. This is a fairly well studied problem.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_scientific_workflow_sys...

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+1 to this comment. It is a reasonably sized body of research, too. On top of this, scientific workflow scheduling maps to the classic scheduling problem, which is known to be NP-hard - the fact that the authors infer that automating the traversal is all that is necessary suggests that they have an incomplete understanding of the problem at hand.

For those interested, a nice list of workflow managers, engines, and even languages can be found at https://github.com/pditommaso/awesome-pipeline.

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