AUTOMATION

InforSense Automation is an extension of InforSense that enables users to orchestrate the execution of different InforSense workflows and to link them using business rules to automate how and when workflows should be run.

InforSense Automation includes the following capabilities:

• Orchestration of multiple workflows into a larger process – Analytical applications typically require linking of several analytical sub-processes. InforSense Automation enables Workflow Builders to construct control flow processes that define how a set of workflows are combined into a larger application.
• Defining business rules – A key capability of InforSense Automation is to allow the Workflow Builder to specify business rules that enable workflows to be started only if specific conditions have been met.
• Creating iterative processes – Automatic processes need to be able to iterate over an analytical task. InforSense Automation enables Workflow Builders to create processes that iterate over different analytical services.
• Defining exception handling behavior –Any automated processes must handle errors gracefully if they occur. InforSense Automation enables Workflow Builders to define what should happen when an exception occurs at any point.

InforSense Automation has been used to deliver the following example solutions.

Continuous Model Validation and Assessment

The accuracy of predicted models to score customer behaviour is a key component in many Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programs within organizations. If the accuracy of the predictions starts to drop then immediately a business decision (based on the model) will become less profitable.

InforSense Automation has been used to build systems that will regularly generate new test sets of data from the current operational systems and use this data in model evaluation processes to measure and monitor the performance of a predicted model. If the performance of the model drops to a significant level, then the system can alert the marketing team and provide detailed reports of how and why the model failed.

Automated Sequence Analysis Facility

Modern laboratory equipment is highly automated allowing for production line style processes for running high-throughput experimentation. As result data is generated by high-throughput experiments, the data processing needs to be equally automated to enable quality checking of the data. InforSense Automation can be used to integrate different sequence fragments and store the data effectively for review by scientists.

A specific example is automated DNA sequencing facilities. The output of the experimental process is a set of short segments of DNA sequence traces. InforSense Automation was used to build automatic processes that are triggered by the completion of an experimental run. At that time the analytical process collects the data and then automatically performs quality control on the raw data, before assembling longer sequences of DNA until the entire sequence is generated. The entire sequence is then used as the starting point to DNA annotations processes. The final result is used to generate a new DNA database.