III: Small: Views of Data-Driven Business Processes: Foundations and Applications

在一个由复杂的业务流程控制的组织中，为利益相关者提供根据他们在组织中的角色定制的工作流视图至关重要。 这些视图在不同的抽象级别上呈现相同的工作流，这些抽象级别只公开与一类用户相关（或授权）的信息。 例如，执行人员可能需要业务流程的高级摘要，而物流工程师可能需要对供应链管理中涉及的操作进行细粒度控制。还需要工作流视图来指定与外部业务伙伴的交互、集成不同的工作流以及验证工作流的自定义。 该项目的目标是正式调查规范机制和语义的数据驱动的工作流的视图，研究技术的视图分析和合成，并开发基于视图的工具，管理数据驱动的工作流。 该项目的成果将有利于各种各样的应用，从电子商务到数字政府，再到医疗保健和科学应用基础设施。 该项目将通过培训研究生和本科生掌握对业务流程至关重要的尖端规格和静态分析技术，促进人力资源开发。与数据库视图类似，工作流视图通常包括隐藏和重构工作流的某些数据和操作。 然而，虽然数据库视图是由查询直接定义的，但数据驱动工作流的视图必须同时处理数据和流程。这就要求运算的表达性超越关系代数的运算符，并导致更丰富的规范机制和语义，这是以前没有探索过的。 此外，由于工作流规范包括对来自无限域的数据的操作，因此分析任务涉及无限状态系统。静态分析的无限状态系统是一个众所周知的挑战性问题，从通用软件验证的经典技术不能很容易地应用，因为这些依赖于有限状态的抽象。 该项目将发挥从逻辑，自动机理论，复杂性理论，算法和自动验证的技术。 它将为数据驱动的工作流程的视图开发正式的基础，包括视图规范的语法和语义以及将视图与原始工作流程连接起来的一致性标准。 它将产生用于检查一致性和综合一致性视图规范的工具。 它将通过将著名的本地视图方法从数据集成扩展到工作流集成，从而产生一种原则性很好的方法来集成来自不同组织单位的工作流。最后，该项目将探索使用视图作为自动验证业务流程的抽象机制。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估。

In an organization governed by a complex business process, it is critical to provide stakeholders with views of the workflow, customized according to their role in the organization. Such views present the same workflow at various levels of abstraction that expose only the information relevant (or authorized) for a class of users. For example, an executive may require a high-level summary of a business process while a logistics engineer might need fine-grained control over actions involved in supply chain management. Workflow views are also needed to specify interactions with external business partners, to integrate different workflows, and to validate customizations of a workflow. The objective of this project is to formally investigate specification mechanisms and semantics for views of data-driven workflows, to study techniques for view analysis and synthesis, and to develop view-based tools for the management of data-driven workflows. The results of the project will benefit a wide variety of applications ranging from e-commerce to digital government to health- care and infrastructure for scientific applications. 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 processes.The project presents significant technical challenges. Analogously to database views, workflow views generally consist of hiding and restructuring some of the data and actions of the workflow. However, while database views are straightforwardly defined by queries, views of data-driven workflows must deal simultaneously with data and process. This requires operations whose expressivity goes beyond relational algebra's operators and results in a much richer landscape of specification mechanisms and semantics, which has not previously been explored. Moreover, since the workflow specifications include the manipulation of data from an infinite domain, analysis tasks involve infinite-state systems. Static analysis of infinite-state systems is a notoriously challenging problem, to which classical techniques from general-purpose software verification cannot be easily applied, since these rely on finite-state abstractions. The project will bring into play techniques from logic, automata theory, complexity theory, algorithms, and automatic verification. It will develop formal foundations for views of data-driven workflows, including syntax and semantics for view specifications and consistency criteria connecting the view to the original workflow. It will produce tools for checking consistency and synthesizing guaranteed-consistent view specifications. It will yield a well-principled approach to integrating workflows from different organizational units, by extending the well-known local-as-view approach from data integration to workflow integration. Finally, the project will explore the use of views as abstraction mechanisms in automatic verification of business processes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.