The (R)evolution of Scientific Workflows in the Agentic AI Era: Towards Autonomous Science
- ORNL
Modern scientific discovery increasingly requires coordinating distributed facilities and heterogeneous resources, forcing researchers to act as manual workflow coordinators rather than scientists. Advances in AI leading to AI agents show exciting new opportunities that can accelerate scientific discovery by providing intelligence as a component in the ecosystem. However, it is unclear how this new capability would materialize and integrate in the real world. To address this, we propose a conceptual framework where workflows evolve along two dimensions which are intelligence (from static to intelligent) and composition (from single to swarm) to chart an evolutionary path from current workflow management systems to fully autonomous scientific laboratories. With these trajectories in mind, we present an architectural blueprint that can help the community take the next steps towards harnessing the opportunities in autonomous science with the potential for 100x discovery acceleration and transformational scientific workflows.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) (SC-21); USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-00OR22725
- OSTI ID:
- 3009442
- Resource Relation:
- 2025 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC '25) - St Louis, Missouri, United States of America - 11/15/2025-11/20/2025
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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