This award is for the support of a collaborative research project between Professor Michael Kifer, Computer Science Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Dr. I. Hakki Toroslu, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. These scientists plan to work on the development of a powerful logic-based formalism for modeling of workflows and for verification of their correctness. The formalism will be built on top of Concurrent Transaction Logic (CTR) for which there is already promising results. They also plan to develop a prototype of a workflow management system scheduler and verifier based on this formalism. There is already an implementation of a CTR-based workflow scheduler, which proves the feasibility of this approach. The proposed implementation will build on this experience and will result in a flexible workflow management system centered on an extensible and verifiable task scheduler.
Scope: This project will support collaboration between two scientists with complementary qualifications and institutional facilities. The US scientist has been the developer of much of the theoretical background in this study, while the Turkish side has experience in the database management which is required to test the model. The problem to be solved, namely improving workflow management systems is significant scientifically, but also has many important applications to the two countries. The project fits well within the objectives of the Division of International Programs.
