The same approach could, in principle, be applied to experimental tasks. For instance, if we were to design a workflow for testing the degradation in the capacity of a coin cell battery, we may opt to split it into individual charge/discharge cycles, and evaluate the capacity of each completed cycle against the criteria at the workflow level. This is shown in Fig. , where the workflow consists of a pretreatment step ("formation cycles"), the main task which is split into its components ("charge/discharge cycles"), and finally any further steps (here a "safety discharge" to allow safe sample disposal). However, from an experimental point of view, this is often impractical, as the decision making process introduces an undefined delay between the individual cycles, which might be problematic in distributed systems with many parallel workflows. In particular, prolonged storage of the coin cell at a state of high charge or deep discharge may affect the cell performance, introducing an unacceptable degree of uncertainty into the workflow.