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 (www.cs.ucsb.edu/~su/NSF/0812578).
