Frank Leymann - Biography#

Frank Leymann published more than 500 refereed articles in proceedings of international conferences, book chapters, journal papers, and 4 books as (co-)author. He holds more than 70 granted international patents in the area of workflow management, transaction processing, cloud computing, and middleware. His book on “Production Workflows” became a seminal book on the architecture of workflow systems, his book on “The Web Services Platform” has been translated into Japanese. Furthermore, he is co-author of many international standards like the set of BPEL standards, Human Task and BPMN in the workflow domain, the set of WS-RF standards in the Grid domain, and TOSCA in the cloud domain.

According to Google Scholar his work has been cited more than 43300 times and his H-Index is 89. He is one of the highest ranked computer scientists in the world (see “Palsberg list”). A scientometric analysis at IEEE lists him amongst the 50 most productive researchers of the world in the cloud computing domain (at rank 13).

Well-known is his work on (i) workflow management (e.g. transactional workflows, process mining), (ii) service computing (e.g. service compositions), (iii) cloud computing (e.g. provisioning and management, cloud computing patterns), (iv) workflow and cloud modelling languages (e.g. BPEL, TOSCA), and (v) hybrid quantum-classical applications.

He has also impact on the industrial world: his ideas have been adopted and implemented in software products in practice. For example, workflow products of several companies as well as open source implementations realize his transactional workflow ideas and architectural concepts (e.g. IBM, Oracle, Microsoft). His work on service orientation and corresponding standards have been realized in service bus products by many companies and open source initiatives. He was the driving force behind the OASIS cloud standard TOSCA, and he initiated and supervised the development of the open source software OpenTOSCA (downloaded more than 1000 times).