III: Small: Specification and Analysis of Multi-Actor Data-Driven Business Processes

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Businesses and other organizations increasingly rely on electronic workflows underlying business processes. These workflows are often centered around a database and involve multiple interacting actors carrying out different roles. They are typically very complex and prone to costly bugs, which leads to the need for computer-aided design and analysis tools. These are critical for increasing confidence in the robustness and correctness of complex business processes. The general objective of this project is to develop new techniques and tools for specifying, analyzing, managing, and optimizing complex data-driven business processes, with an explicit focus on the multi actor setting. This includes data sharing and updating, designing actor interface specifications to the global workflow tailored to different roles, and specification of contractual obligations among interacting actors. It will also consider runtime analysis tasks, including the distributed monitoring of critical global properties, the use of local actor observations to infer information about the global workflow, and validating autonomous offline partial workflow executions by actors. The techniques and tools resulting from this project will increase confidence in the robustness and correctness of such systems, and enhance their functionality and efficiency. This will benefit a wide variety of applications such as supply-chain management, e-commerce, digital government and electronic health-care management. The project will contribute to the development of human resources by training graduate and undergraduate students in cutting-edge specification and static analysis techniques which are crucial to business process management.Achieving the objectives of the project requires fundamental advances in our understanding of data-driven workflows involving multiple interacting actors. In the broader context of software verification, the goals are particularly challenging because they involve the analysis of infinite-state systems, whereas classical software verification typically deals with finite-state abstractions. The project will extend the techniques recently developed for data-driven workflows to the multi-actor scenario, and provide insight into the trade off between expressiveness of the specification language and tractability of analysis tasks. The technical problems raised are intellectually challenging, and will bring into play techniques from logic, automata theory, computational complexity, algorithms, and computer-aided verification.For further information see the project web site at: http://db.ucsd.edu/nsf/actors