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

在一个由复杂业务流程管理的组织中，向涉众提供工作流视图是至关重要的，这些视图是根据涉众在组织中的角色定制的。这样的视图在不同的抽象层次上呈现相同的工作流，这些抽象层次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研究数据驱动工作流视图的规范机制和语义，研究视图分析和综合的技术，并开发用于管理数据驱动工作流的基于视图的工具。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到医疗保健和科学应用的基础设施。该项目将通过培训对业务流程至关重要的尖端规范和静态分析技术的研究生和本科生，为人力资源的发展做出贡献。该项目提出了重大的技术挑战。与数据库视图类似，工作流视图通常包含隐藏和重构工作流的一些数据和操作。然而，当数据库视图直接由查询定义时，数据驱动工作流的视图必须同时处理数据和流程。这需要具有超越关系代数运算符的表达能力的操作，并产生更丰富的规范机制和语义，这是以前没有研究过的。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。无限状态系统的静态分析是一个非常具有挑战性的问题，来自通用软件验证的经典技术不能轻易应用于此，因为这些技术依赖于有限状态抽象。该项目将运用逻辑、自动机理论、复杂性理论、算法和自动验证等技术。它将为数据驱动工作流的视图建立正式的基础，包括视图规范的语法和语义，以及将视图连接到原始工作流的一致性标准。它将产生用于检查一致性和综合保证一致性视图规范的工具。通过将众所周知的“本地即视图”方法从数据集成扩展到工作流集成，它将产生一种原则良好的方法来集成来自不同组织单元的工作流。最后，该项目将探索在业务流程的自动验证中使用视图作为抽象机制。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并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，被认为值得支持。

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.