How An Action Gets Executed

Actors and Abilities exist to allow a layer of indirection between the Workflow and the actual hardware. In a sense, Actors and their Abilities define a kind of “interface” that can be “implemented” by Action Modules and their Actions. This allows for calls to the same Action to be executed on different, equivalent hardware. For example, you might have an Actor called “liquid_handler” that represents all the liquid handlers in your lab, and an Actor called “plate_reader” that represents all the plate readers in your lab.