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

该项目正在为工作流和业务流程管理开发一个新的基础，称为“基于构件的语义工作流模型”，并在此背景下开发用于指定、设计、演化和实现工作流的新的理论结果、技术和算法。新的基金会基于两个基本前提。第一种是使用IBM Research首创的基于构件的工作流方法。这种方法是以数据为中心的，而不是以流程为中心的，并允许根据工作流操作的关键业务构件(或实体)所需的生命周期来组织工作流。第二个前提是使用来自语义Web服务的技术，以基于要执行的工作流服务(或任务)的语义和业务经理的基本目标来实现对工作流的声明性规范。这从根本上不同于目前大多数工作流规范的方法，后者是过程性的。拟议研究的主要目的是开发技术成果(例如，技术、算法和工具)，以实现工作流的自动化构建，从要操作的构件、可能应用于它们的单个服务和要实现的目标(使用逻辑公式而不是流程图表示)的规范开始。有关更多信息，请访问项目网页(http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~su/NSF/0812578).

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).