workflow as a composition of operations a resource and infrastructure operational workflow or a plan is a named partial order composition of a set or library of named operations drawn from a larger set of pre defined resource or infrastructure management operations 7 well defined runtime semantics for the workflow the workflow runtime semantics is defined via a workflow plan u201c semantics u201d object that is passed as an additional argument to the workflow plan in general the workflow plan semantics are defined to support typical desired semantics such as but not limited to below atomicity semantics this is supported only if for every control operation there is a matching rollback operation that is defined error handling semantics this is useful to suggest whether to return on first critical error or continue even if an error is encountered ordering semantics in a partial order workflow plan an ordering may be specified for the sub compositions of the plan that may be otherwise run asynchronously priority semantics in a work flow plan a priority may be attached for the particular sub composition of the workflow plan for instance a particular sub composition may be attached high priority in which case all resources may be provided to the high priority sub composition temporal automation semantics this is used to suggest perhaps how much time to wait before the plan starts to be executed or how much time to wait.