III-Small-COR: Automatic Construction of Artifact-based Workflows

该项目正在开发工作流和业务流程管理的新基础，称为“基于工件的语义工作流模型”，并在此上下文中开发用于指定、设计、发展和实现工作流的新理论结果、技术和算法。新基金会基于两个基本前提。第一种是使用IBM Research首创的基于工件的工作流方法。这种方法以数据为中心，而不是以流程为中心，并允许根据工作流操作的关键业务工件（或实体）的预期生命周期来构建工作流。第二个前提是使用语义web服务的技术来支持基于要执行的工作流服务（或任务）的语义和业务经理的底层目标的工作流声明性规范。这与目前大多数流程化的工作流规范方法根本不同。所提议的研究的一个主要推力是开发技术结果（例如，技术、算法和工具），以启用工作流的自动化构建，从要操作的工件的规范开始，可能应用于它们的单个服务，以及要实现的目标（使用逻辑公式而不是流程图表示）。更多信息可以从项目网页（http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~su/NSF/0812578）找到。

This project is developing a new foundation for workflow and business process management, called the "artifact-based semantic workflow model", and working in this context to develop new theoretical results, techniques and algorithms for specifying, designing, evolving, and implementing workflows. The new foundation is based on two fundamental premises. The first is to use the artifact-based approach to workflow pioneered at IBM Research. This approach is data-centric rather than process-centric, and allows to structure workflows according to the desired life-cycle of key business artifacts (or entities) that are manipulated by a workflow. The second premise is to use techniques from semantic web services to enable the declarative specification of workflows based on the semantics of the workflow services (or tasks) to be performed and underlying goals of the business managers. This is fundamentally different from most current approaches to workflow specification, which are procedural. A major thrust of the proposed research is to develop technical results (e.g., techniques, algorithms, and tools) to enable the automated construction of workflows, starting from from a specification of the artifacts to be manipulated, the individual services that might be applied to them, and a goal to be achieved (expressed using a logic formula rather than as a flowchart). More information can be found from the project web page (http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~su/NSF/0812578).